Percentage increase in traffic

[stefansavva]

Is there a general way of working out the percentage increase in traffic against rising up the search listings?

ie If I have a site displayed on the fifth page of Googles results what increase in traffic could I expect if I raised the site to display on the second page?

[gilli]

Not really depends on a million and one factors. For example you could move up to number 1 for the term "very small greeny-blue disposable widget fan club" but it would not result in any significant increase in traffic.

[fathom]

Using a ballpark...

If 1000 uses per day

Ranked #1 get about 18% more than ranked #3

750 search queries will not move/click beyond the first page.

Note: default setting in Google is depth 20.

Less than 10% or about 100 searchers will move/click through to the third page.

Totally market dependent though... I have one -- rank #23 (2nd page, depth 20; or 3rd page, depth 10) that now receives 1500+ per day, on an average daily queries rate of 75,000 uses.

[gilli]

For what its worth here is the break down of what page I see people coming from on Google.

Top 10
Page 1 - 77.1%
Page 2 - 9.6%
Page 4 - 5.8%
Page 3 - 2.4%
Page 5 - 2.2%
Page 8 - 1.2%
Page 6 - 0.7%
Page 9 - 0.4%
Page 7 - 0.3%
Page 21 - 0.2%

However I think this is pretty specific to me & my terms. There's one term of mine that people regularly go to page 21 to find :) All the rest are terms that people have less patience with.

[fathom]

That Page 4 - 5.8% is pretty wierd...

I guess after page #1 it's... Odds or Evens Gus?

[martinibuster]

Hey, are you counting Google adwords in those counts? For certain searches, especially if you're positioned up north, you can get some ridiculously high click through rates, beating the listings that are optimized and positioned in the regular results.

If the serps and ads are relevant on the first page, the likelihood of someone finding you on the second, let alone the fourth page, are less than slim.

So, even if you rise up the rankings, it's no guarantee that you'll see an increase in traffic, especially if the ads are strongly relevant.

[annej]

If you have a good site that a lot of people bookmark and tell others about eventually a huge number of your visitors won't even come from Google. Of course you still want to do well with Google in order to get new people to your sites but there is so much more to consider in an estimate like that.

[gilli]

I don't have any adwords so - no not counting them.

The Page 4 & Page 21 results are kind of proving my point that there are no hard & fast predictions that can be made on SERP -> click through rates.

I guess it comes largely down to the fact that there are some queries that people will keep searching on until they find what they want and others that are easily satisfied on the first couple of pages.

Also I don't really do any extreme SEO stuff and I don't have a particularly high traffic site.

[Chicago]

Stefan- Here are is a mix of numbers from CyberAtlas and IProspect that I am currently working with:

CyberAtlas reports that 56 percent of Internet users don't bother looking through more than two pages of results on search engines.

According to a recent study from iProspect, three-quarters of Internet users use search engines. However, 16 percent of Internet users only look at the first few search results, while 32 percent will read through to the bottom of the first page.

Only 23 percent of searchers go beyond the second page, and the numbers drop for every page thereafter.

Only 10.3 percent of Internet users will look through the first three pages of results, while just 8.7 percent will look through more than three pages.

[fathom]

The stats provided are relatively accurate, and do not include AdWords or premium listings.

In generally, overall usage could be divided by 3 - but Premium and AdWords have not cornered 100% of any market, and I doubt they ever will.

Some people just are not interested in clicking on ads... much like some people just are not interested in clicking on pop-ups or banners.

[annej]

Interesting stats Chicago. Thanks

Are we assuming a page of 10 results or 20? Though I suspect most just look at the first page whether it's 10 or 20 but I'm curious what the research was based on.

Anne

[Night_Hawk]

To get real traffic (buyers), you will be lucky if they go past the 4th page and that is pushing it abit.

[Chicago]

Good question Anne-

Default Google = 10
MSN = 15
Yahoo = 20

Here is the article:

[cyberatlas.internet.com...]

It is an interesting little article in general.

[fathom]

Note: default setting in Google is depth 20.

Thanks Chicago - my error -- default setting in Google is depth 10

[stefansavva]

Interesting reading. Many thanks all.