How Many Clicks to Expect Based on Your Website's Google Rank

It surprises me that so many businesses don’t realize how important their Google rank is to their business. Companies who do “get it” happily spend thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on search engine optimization for their website every year and are making a killing. They’re picking up their customers and your customers too. They know when their site ranks well the return on their investment can be staggering. But just how many people will click on your site if it’s ranked # 1 versus #5 or even #10? Slingshot SEO completed an enormous 6 month web study to find out. Here’s what they found regarding website position and percentage of searchers who clicked on the listings:

#1 position = 18.2%
#2 = 10.05%
#3 = 7.22%
4 = 4.81%
5 = 3.09%
6 = 2.76%
7 = 1.88%
8 = 1.75%
9 = 1.52%
10 = 1.04%

If you’re on page 2 or more, forget about it because it’s much less than 1%.

So what does this mean? Say your Chinese restaurant website is in the 7th position on Google for the search phrase “Phoenix Chinese Restaurant” and 10,000 people search for “Phoenix Chinese Restaurant” this month. It stands to reason this would lead to 188 visits to your website. But if you’re in the #1 position, your website should get about 1,820 visitors this month, roughly 9x the amount of web traffic as when you were #7. That’s an enormous difference for climbing just a few positions under one search phrase. Now what if you were also ranked #1, 2 or 3 for numerous other search phrases as well? See where this is going? You have to ask yourself how much is 9x, 100x or even several thousand times more visitors to your website worth to you? Website optimization is where it's at!