Clickthrough Rates (CTR) by Position in Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

So, how much of a difference does it make to move up an extra spot in the search results rankings? Should you be happy with #2 or should you go the extra mile to be #1? What about being on the first page of results versus on the second page?

The short answer is that every spot really matters - especially the closer you get to the top of the rankings in the search engine results page (SERP).

I've seen this data shown on a number of sites, but here's one I most recently looked at (they're all roughly similar). What this data says is that the #1 search result gets nearly 4 times as many clicks as the #2 result, which in turn gets 50% more than #3. We can clearly see how your placement in the SERP makes a world of difference.

Not only that, but position 11 (first result on the second page) only receives 0.7% of clickthroughs, or 1/4th of what the last position in the first page receives. This pretty much means that if you're not on the first page for a search result, you're getting a miniscule share of the overall traffic for that keyword. In fact, 90% of all search traffic goes to a result in the first page.

Titles and Meta Descriptions Drive Clickthrough Rate on Search Engine Results Page

When a user searches for a keyword, the search engine displays the results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The information that is displayed on that page is generally formatted to include a title and a description for each of the results (among other things). The title is underlined as the actual link to the indexed page and the description is right below it to provide the user with some more context as to the contents of that page. Also, the search engine shows the keyword bolded whenever it appears in the title and/or description.

The search engine decides which title to show for a page by looking at the title tag for that page and displaying that. The description below that is generally what's included in the meta description tag (meta name="description" content=...). The search engine may not show the description if it finds that to be inadequate in some fashion (e.g., if it's too short).

For this reason, what you define as the title and description of a page is not only important for SEO, but it's also important in driving clickthrough rates from the SERP. A title and description that is written for a search engine (e.g., non-sensical string of keywords) may help you rank better, but it oftentimes may reduce the potential clickthrough rate as users are unable to understand what a page is about and skip over it. Make sure to keep that potential tradeoff in mind as you craft those two fields.