Blind spot on the first page
Having your site on the first page of search results in Google, ranking for a one word, competitive search term is great. You know that you are doing a good job and traffic is coming through. And you try to get you site even higher. Being 10th is not enough, of course. As everybody knows higher the ranking the more clicks you get.
SEOBlackhat’s QuadsZilla has posted some time ago about what was worth to rank in Google, Yahoo and MSN. His calculations indicated that each step towards the wholy grail you make, the higher the rank the click through you would experience, except for moving from 10th to 9th when you actually see a little drom in click throughs. Here’s QuadsZilla’s table.
Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.
Cornell University Eye-Tracking Analysis of SE Users’ Behavior, a study pervormed by Laura A. Granka, Thorsten Joachims and Geri Cay, produced different results.
Source: searchresearcher.com
You can clearly see that, although generally higher rankings get more attention and clicks, there is a blind spot at the 7th placement. It is the most unfortunate SERP in the top ten. With click through rate of 0.36 it is far worst than any other placement. If you rank 7th you are doomed and do anything to get out from this click desert, even if you can only go lower in ranking.
Unfortunatelly, I have experienced the doomed 7th spot and the drop in clicks and sales was, indeed, similar to Cornell University’s test results.
7 is not your lucky number!
Cornell University research results are published here (PDF)
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