This is a really strange statistic. Also is it for natural source or for adsense? I know the people who don’t have business on the internet but always make internet shopping they don't know what is the difference between natural source and adsence. If take a google 3 first places are for adsence. When we talking about first place what do you mean?
I think that some ideas about the % can be bogus unless there are absolute facts or research to back-them-up. Could be pure speculation. Just in my own niche, I consider this... Suppose 10 tree services or arborists are competing for the top few positions. Now, what happens if a person searches for "Portland Tree Service" ?? What if the first two positions due to title tags produce "Johnny's Trimming Service" and "A to Z Landscape and Tree Services" ?? What if the next few are like mine, where I skip my company name in the title tags altogether - "Portland OregonTree Service" ? What words were running through the typists mind a moment before they clicked? The words that they typed, of course. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what they are looking for. Those are the ones I look for, especially if I'm using the highlighter tool. In fact, I just tested that last keyword, and noticed that my closest competitor "Arbor Pro" changed their title tags from having ARBOR PRO first, to having "Portland" before "Arbor Pro". So I think its got a lot to do with what text is going to catch someone's eye. I wouldn't be surprised if the title tags can affect the percentages of the top few spots by 10% t 40%.
for my industry it depends who's ahead of me, if I build a really nice site with great content, and I'm position 8 and everything ahead of me is kind of spammy, I get just as much traffic as when I later get into the top spots. if someone has the same products at the same price and they're in number 1 and I'm in number 2, then it can be harsh, like only 10% of the traffic will visit my site, if I get ahead, it's like google opened a door to Cha-CHING. awesome thread!! Thanks. If someone is ahead of you and their site sucks, don't worry about spending time trying to get ahead of them, you'll just get the same traffic anyway.
Yes Tiltle must be specific to keywords. Clickthrough can be altered by this dramatically Good point. I also find that if I can alter ther displayed URL this increases the URL I used to do it a lot with yahoo, until I chickened out to fear of a ban.
Yes Good point I always click off a spammy site rather quickly and go on the one below. I Also tend to scan the first 10 links and read what each says and choose which one to click on.
I must say you guys seem to right. My main website dominates yahoo but has only just emerged from the sandbox mainly to middle of page one. of middle of page two Despite the good google ranking I have had no change in traffic
http://www.redcardinal.ie/search-en...08-2006/clickthrough-analysis-of-aol-datatgz/ gives a detailed explanation
I don't want the curious, I want the "where do I sign now to get mey van tommorrow" keywords, but sadly no one has typed it into google yet apart from me
well when i drop off from #1 for my search term all the way down to page 24412442 i get 0 traffic...that beats you all
mmm Good view. Really depends on how much the traffic is worth. The average website I compete agianst is about £250 K !
Studies (plural) have shown that #1 on Google gets a dramatically higher percentage of clicks than even #2. And #2 gets substantially more clicks than #3. After #3 the dropoff is significant, but more gradual from #4 to #10. If you want serious traffic, push hard to get to at least #3.
I personally click on sites around number 3 for anything I search. Just a habit. It makes sense #1 getting more hits then others. After all they did lot of work to get on top.
My site was #4 for its keyword, the last week its jumped to #1, about a 300-400 hits increase in traffic.
Even though top 3 get 80% of the traffic, you must remember that there is a lot of traffic to go around, so even 20% of the traffic could mean a lot.
What really sucks is that Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, About.com pages, etc. get a lot of the really great top spots (Usually the top 1-3), even though they don't provide anything other than information.
I am constantly tweaking content, keywords, descriptions, and link anchor text to push #4-#10 results into the top three. The traffic difference is major! The top three search results get far more clicks than #4-10 combined.
Yes spot on jim. When you look at the data i posted over the page and convert the percentage of clicks in to traffic numbers it is a very accurate break down for Google even though it was obtained from AOL.
From my logs anything beyond spot 5 or 6 takes a big hit almost like being on second page. It really depends on the search results returned!
I think in top 4 google the hits are about 65 percent.It is better to be in this positions otherwise of a little use.