A friend of mine was recently wondering, “What’s the difference between being ranked #1 and #2 on Google?”
He guessed that it wouldn’t be very much, maybe like 10% max.
Well, surprisingly it’s much higher than that!
While I haven’t seen any data from Google for the click-through rate averages for each position, there’s data floating around from AOL that could easily be applied to any search engine.
- Ranking #1 gets 42.1 % of clicks
- Ranking #2 gets 11.9 % of clicks
- Ranking #3 gets 8.5 % of clicks
- Ranking #4 gets 6.1 % of clicks
- Ranking #5 gets 4.9 % of clicks
- Ranking #6 gets 4.1 % of clicks
- Ranking #7 gets 3.4 % of clicks
- Ranking #8 gets 3.0 % of clicks
- Ranking #9 gets 2.8 % of clicks
- Ranking #10 gets 3.0 % of clicks
This means that if a keyword gets 100 searches a month, the #1 result will get 42 clicks whereas the #2 result will only get 12! Pretty big difference.
Great example of why it’s so important to be ranked #1 
Even better, if you’re #1 for organic search results, Google Maps listings, AND AdWords, you can completely dominate the competition.
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Interesting too that being ranked 10th seems to be better than 9th!
Agreed! When I first read that I thought it was strange but when you think about it the 10th spot is easier to see because it’s at the very bottom where people scroll if they want to get to the 2nd page.
Really surprised!! I thought the differences would be in the 10 percentile range difference. Looks like only the #1 position matters.
BTW, thanks for the post – exactly the data what i was looking for.
Great post..I mean – I´ve had no idea that there is such a huge difference between first and second position..looks like it is first position or nothing..
Really interesting I will use this alongside googles keyword traffic estimator to find the most efficient keywords to target
Nice post, but many difference present in chart. Means big diff between first and second, tenth is better than ninth. Interesting and surprised.