keyword position
Importance of Search Engine Results Position
Whether you are relying upon SEO, SEM, or a combination of both to achieve targeted traffic from search engine results pages you probably know that achieving a position within the top three results is critical. All too often I hear, “I need to be #1 in Google for X term” without having any science associated with it, but as you can see in the image below from Enquiro Research which conducted eye tracking studies for visitors almost all visible eye movement is focused on the top five results.
You can clearly see that eye tracking is focused on the upper left hand corner of the search engine results page, with minimal eye movement down towards the bottom of the page. There is also very little eye movement in the lower right corner of the page, typically where position 5+ SEM ads are placed. Enquiro’s visual eye tracking study is solidified when you look at the CTR (click through rate) associated with results in major search engine results pages. Pete at Searchlight Digital provided the following SERP Click Through Rates recently:
Rank Clicks Click % Delta #n-1 Delta #1 1 8220278 42.30% n/a n/a 2 2316738 11.92% -71.82% -71.82% 3 1640751 8.44% -29.18% -80.04% 4 1171642 6.03% -28.59% -85.75% 5 943667 4.86% -19.46% -88.52% 6 774718 3.99% -17.90% -90.58% 7 655914 3.37% -15.34% -92.02% 8 579206 2.98% -11.69% -92.95% 9 549196 2.83% -5.18% -93.32% 10 577325 2.97% 5.12% -92.98% 11 127688 0.66% -77.88% -98.45% 12 108555 0.56% -14.98% -98.68% 13 101802 0.52% -6.22% -98.76% 14 94221 0.48% -7.45% -98.85% 15 91020 0.47% -3.40% -98.89% 16 75006 0.39% -17.59% -99.09% 17 70054 0.36% -6.60% -99.15% 18 65832 0.34% -6.03% -99.20% 19 62141 0.32% -5.61% -99.24% 20 58384 0.30% -6.05% -99.29% 21 55471 0.29% -4.99% -99.33% 31 23041 0.12% -58.46% -99.72% 41 14024 0.07% -39.13% -99.83
Pete followed up the data with the following analysis: “As you can see, the number one position receives just over 42% of all clicks. Where this gets really interesting though is when you look at what can happen if you own most of the real estate on a good SERP. The top four results put together account for over two thirds of all clicks that will happen (68.69% in total). The top ten taken as a whole will give nearly nine tenths! (Actual total figure - 89.69%).”
What this clearly shows is that eye tracking and CTR clearly favors being within the top five results. What this doesn’t necessarily show is that being #1 is always better than being #2 or #3. Sure, you need traffic, but that doesn’t always show a correlation. For those of you who are using Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords you can see a Keyword Position report like the one shown below:
The default as you can see in the picture is to show ‘Visits’. Now while visits is important we already know that being in the top five positions will result in more traffic than being in position 26. What we’re concerned about is how this relates to the conversion rate and associated monetary gain on our website. For that we can still use the Keyword Positions report, but change the breakdown to focus on conversion metrics like the image below demonstrates:
What this image demonstrates is how through the Keyword Position report you can see from which position your conversions came from. Keep in mind that just because one has a 15% conversion rate and another has 5% doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re better off bidding for position A or B if you’re running SEM through Adwords. Ensure that your data is statistically significant by using a conversion confidence calcualatorand then you can feel confident that the correlations and sub relations that you’re making actually make sense. In theory the beauty of this is that you could potentially pay less to run in position three that converts at a higher rate than paying more to be in position one. Hopefully this helps with your position strategies. Does anyone have any related stories about correlations between position and conversion rate?
