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.
An excellent SEO service I’ve used in the past is Mariah’s SEO Blaster. She’s very skilled at helping local and global businesses get ranked highly in all 3 of the above categories.
