Pretend you were ranked 11 or 12 in Google for a term that is searched for roughly 50,000 times / month on overture. Roughly the same is reported on wordtracker. Will going from high on the second page, to anywhere on the first page make a huge difference in traffic generated from the search engine? Is it the same with Yahoo and MSN?
first page and second page has a big difference ... more than 95 % people will search only in first page ( according to me ) .. Even with the first 5 , the site which rank first will get 50 times more visits than the one which is rank 5th
Same with all the search engines. I hardly check the second page. Normally only researcheres check more than 2-3 pages
Yep, you can expect to get an increase of around 30-40% from moving to the first page. That is only from personal experience. Brad
Brad's numbers may be on the low end. Also, there's a pretty big difference between the positions on the first page. Position #4 may receive two times the amount of traffic as #8.
I recall seeing an eye tracking study that indicated that Google at least has a nearly 100% tracking rate for positions 1 thru 3 and from 4 to 6 it dropped by about 15% per position. 7,8,9 and 10 were single digits or low teens. The eye tracking rate correlated very closely with the click rate where a vast majority of users clicked thru one of the first three sites. On Yahoo and MSN the same study showed far less predictability. I would gather that the level of trust in Google is greater so a top 3 listing is key to traffic. On the other engines it appears you can rank on page one and do ok. As for moving to a page 2 or 3 or beyond I am not sure what the metrics might show, but from personal experience a page one listing will yield about 60% more visits than a page 2 and so on.
I agreed that only researchers perform deep searches on keywords. Normally, searchers only look at the first 10 results and bypass the rest..
think about it yourself when was the last time that you searched for something did you check out the second page? how often in your life did you ever check the 2nd page at all the bottom line, if you are not in the first page, you do not exist at least in SE traffic
Haha... I do a lot of researches on my competitors and will perform plenty of deep searches. For a normal person, i do not think so...
I've seen two different, extensive studies of this topic. As far as search results being clicked on, for any decent search engine traffic you must make the first page of the SERPs. And once there, aim for the top three, which get far more traffic than from #4 on down. And even there, #2 gets many more clicks than #3. And #1 receives multiple times more clicks than #2. The "pot of gold" traffic-wise is getting to #1.
I agree with Jim. The only thing I'll add is that you should also think about how the title tags appears from a human perspective. Many times I'll see a page ranking for #2 but I'll skip it because it looks spamy. Even the average person is getting good at scanning descriptions and terms. So yes, #1 gets more hits then #2, most of the time... but if your site which ranks #3 appears really relavent while #1 & #2 look very spammy, then that rule might not apply. But going back to your originally question... page 1 vs page 2. Yes I believe there is a big difference there. I just don't stress over positions within the top five. And always, your mileage may vary.