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We all know that ranking on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords will vastly improve your traffic as opposed to ranking on the second or third pages; but how does each incremental place that you rank on the first page affect your traffic?

If you rank position 5, how much more traffic could you expect to receive by ranking position 4, 3, 2 or even first place? If you knew the potential increase in traffic to your website, you’d know whether it was worth hiring an SEO firm to boost your rankings to gain that coveted #1 spot. Google naturally protects information like this, so we could only speculate on the increase in traffic… until now.

AOL recently released figures on CTR (click through rates) for the different positions in their index. The figures were sufficiently high enough to be considered accurate and thus can be expected to reflect traffic levels across most search engines, Google included.

So what are the results? What does being ranked #1 as opposed to #10 mean to your traffic?

According to AOL’s results, if you rank position #10 and received approximately 147,000 clicks, you can expect an increase of over 1,928,000 clicks. That’s almost 2 million extra visitors for ranking #1, an increase of 1,400%!!!

Obviously if your traffic levels are more modest, and you only receive 200 visits per month for being ranked #10 in Google you can still expect a 1,400% increase for being ranked #1 – which would take your 200 visitors per month to a more profitable 2,800. That’s a lot.

So what is #1 worth to you if you already rank #2? Beating your nearest competitor to the top spot can make all the difference and transform your traffic. These figures show that being ranked #1 as opposed to #2 will increase your traffic by 3 1/2 times, that’s 350% more traffic, just for moving up one place! So if you’re ranked #2 and your competitor is #1, they’re probably getting 350% more traffic from that keyword than you are.

One interesting result to come from these figures is that being ranked #10 actually gets you marginally more traffic than being ranked #9. I’m not suggesting you aim to drop a place if you’re ranked #9 of course, but it does show you that being ranked #10 isn’t the end of the world.

The placements in the middle of the front page show just as drastic a difference, as being ranked #1 will net you more than 10 times the traffic than if you were ranked #6.

What this all shows you is that just a little improvement in your SE rankings can net you massive amounts of additional traffic. Make a note of where you rank in Google for your chosen keywords and then have a look at your stats to see how much traffic you’re receiving for that keyword.

This table will show you how much traffic you can expect for each first page placement on Google compared with ranking #1

Ranking Position Traffic Level
#1 Ranking Position 1
#2 3.5 times less than #1
#3 4.9 times less than #1
#4 6.9 times less than #1
#5 8.5 times less than #1
#6 10.4 times less than #1
#7 12.3 times less than #1
#8 14 times less than #1
#9 14.8 times less than #1 (the worst place to rank on page 1)
#10 14.1 times less than #1

You can see from this that ranking #8 – #10 shows little difference in traffic, but it starts to rise very steeply as you move up the rankings.

This graph shows the number of clicks for the top 10 positions for a highly searched phrase. It’s pretty evident from this that ranking #1 produces fantastic results as opposed to the other placements on the front page.

Once you’ve analysed your stats to see what your current traffic levels are in relation to where you rank you’ll be able to determine if it’s potentially profitable to use an SEO firm. There’s no point ranking #1 for keywords that no one is searching for, or if your potential traffic would be too low to warrant the expense.

Incidentally one nugget that also emerged from these figures is that 10% of all searches result on clicks on page 2 of the results. Page 1 isn’t the only place to be, you will also get traffic from a second page placement.

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Tags: EWSS, Google, SEO