Checking the ClickThrough Rate
I wanted to check the click through ratios of organic results in Google. As we published before, here: , we do have some kind of idea of the click through ratios based on some data that leaked from AOL a few years ago. Here it is:
But since I never trust anything I didn’t check myself, and sheerseo is unique in having a lot of data regarding both rankings in SERPS, visits from those SERPs and search volume numbers, we are in great position to be able to investigate this information.
So, here is what we got:
The results are based on about 10,000 keywords, taken from hundreds of domains. The data is based on Google Webmaster Tools for the actual clicks (visits). Note that we can’t use Google Analytics since it is no longer reliable for this information as many of the organic keywords information is not counted. The SERPs is based on our rankings collection of data. The search volume per keyword is based on Google Keyword Planner. One note is that I tried to weed out missleading data like the name of the site as a keyword. For example, sheerseo.com would be clicked more than the average click through rate for the keyword “sheerseo”, but this is unfair.
Now, let’s analyze the data.
- You can see that the numbers are lower than the ones we have from AOL. The #1 rank for example, is 26.45% and in AOL it was 42.3%.
- Rank 7 is a little higher than 4-6. Not sure why. Could be just an anomaly in the data we used, but might happen since it is many times at the bottom of the page you first see when you get the results, or the fact that even if you scroll to the bottom, #7 will appear, so it is in the screen no matter how you scroll the page. Just trying to understand it.
- Notice the big drop from #1 to #2. Life is cruel.
- #10 gets less than 20 times the traffic that #1 gets.
- #4-#7 are more or less the same. So, no big deal in investing to promote a result that is #7. On the other side, you don’t want it to drop to #8, which gets just half the traffic of #7.
Now, let’s look at SERPs 11-20:
Not much to say about this. Just the sad fact that those results get a lot less clicks than the ones in first page. All of them are less then 1% click through rate.
Hope you enjoyed this data and hope to hear your thoughts on this.
Ayal
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