A recent study of Google organic results yield some interesting finds. Tenth spot on page one outperforms the top result...sort of.It's no secret that where you rank on Google's search engine results page (SERP), and particularly where you rank on page one of the Google organic results can be the difference between having your web page -- or now Google+ Local Listing -- be the equivalent of a back water town or a bustling metropolis. The "holy grail" has always been "page one" of Google's organic search results (as opposed to the "paid advertisements" which appear at the top and side of most searches).
Well, it turns out that the thinking-pool over at Chitika just did some number crunching, and can give you an interesting look at just where the best spot on page one actually is (at least, statistically). The numbers are in some way pretty much what you'd expect, but also slightly surprising. (NOTE: Search engine page results (SERPs) can include the results in the paid advertising, which may or may not skew these numbers slightly. Nevertheless, they're interesting.
The first metric looked at is the share of the impressions by page position on the Google organic results -- i.e., how many screens did the particular result appear on. As you'd expect, "above the fold" (the first 600 pixels of the page) show the most.
Clearly, the first Google organic search result naturally appears more often than, say, the 8th or 9th. But then things get wonky. See, you'd expect that the site that gets the lion's share of the impressions would get the lion's share of clicks, but the click through rate (CTR) of the first page is oddly LOWER than even the 10th result!
This may seem staggering: "in terms of CTR alone, the tenth result on Google’s SERP outperforms the first organic link by more than 66%." But bear in mind first that that click through rate difference, though "66%", is also actually about .8 of a percentage point.
Bear in mind too that the VOLUME of the click through traffic for the 10th result is only 8% of what the first result gets. It basically means that those who are willing to "mine" the first page of the Google organic results are more likely to take seriously all offerings on page one, including those ranking at the bottom of page one -- and honestly, this smacks of how we often search, doesn't it?
Pretty cool, huh?
So, now that you know that, what's page 1 really worth?
