Rank => hits: statistics?

[wolfpack]

Hi,

I'm new to ranking / SEO.

Is there anywhere where there's statistics on how search engine click-thru drops off with increasing rank? ie, how many more hits can I expect if I move from 9 to 8, or from 17 to 16, or from 3 to 2?

The (extremely useful - thanks!) tools on this site, plus my own hit counts, have allowed me to generate a few data points, but not enough to be particularly meaningful.

Say I take the number of hits that came to me from google searches for "xyz", and divide that by, e.g., wordtracker's daily hits for "xyz", and call that percentage my cut of the pie. If I do that for a bunch of xyz's and plot them against my ranks for those search terms, I get a curve that represents how my cut changes with rank.

As I say, I only have a few data points, but what if we pooled them? Maybe we could get to some statistically significant numbers that would be useful to all of us?

I'd put up mine if others would put up theirs. If you're worried about privacy, I don't need the site or even what the search term was, just the numbers.

Interesed?

[ephricon]

I take a much less scientific approach, but have found myself that there is not a huge noticeable difference between ranking say 6 versus 7 for a given term. Indeed, small movements in Google (and others) may change by the day, if not more frequently. Instead, I'll pose the following:

- its "better" to be on the first page (top 10) than the second page
- its "better" to be top 5 than 6-10
- most visitors will scan through the first page starting at the top
- of the ten results on the first page the title, description, and url make a larger difference in which site gets visited than does individual spots. this said, the higher ranking site that the user deems valid gets their traffic.

I would say there is a difference to being #1 versus #10 or even #6 or so, but the difference between 7 and 8 and 8 and 9 is negligible. The user will see both of these and pick which one seems to be the most appropriate. There is, however, a VERY significant difference to being #10 versus #11 (first page v. second page) and #20 vs. #21 (second v. third page). After the top 30 or so results you really aren't likely to get much traffic unless its a ridiculously heavily searched term or the top 30 sites provide nothing of use to the user (even so, most will do another search than look at page 4, 5 and so on).

my two cents...

[hans]

i have observed the positions of various of my major keywords for several years now and have found NO noticable change by climbing the ladder UP on PR

[relaxzoolander]

ephricon---
thats exactly my reaction to questions like this.
so many people get hung up on the numbers that i believe that they can start to miss the big picture.
its like all the questions i have seen about how to tell if you are a low pr6 or a high pr6.
what difference does it really make? not much.

i think human nature applies more to understanding the value of ranking spots. your analysis covers that concept pretty well. in general...being on the first page means top ten....the higher the better. but a poorly written title...even at the no. 3 spot will be passed over for a well written no. 4 spot title. i also believe a lot of people are drawn towards the bolded text in the titles of the search terms. like i said...human nature plays a big part. on the flip side...i have gotten hits from a page ranking as low as 500...now thats a dedicated searcher!