How much is the top spot on Google actually worth? According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth a ton – double the traffic of the #2 spot, to be precise.
In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement. The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.
“Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be,” says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby. “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.”
The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1. Going from the 11th spot to 10th sees a 143% jump in traffic. However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%. As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position.
| Google Result | Impressions | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,834,806 | 34.35% |
| 2 | 1,399,502 | 16.96% |
| 3 | 942,706 | 11.42% |
| 4 | 638,106 | 7.73% |
| 5 | 510,721 | 6.19% |
| 6 | 416,887 | 5.05% |
| 7 | 331,500 | 4.02% |
| 8 | 286,118 | 3.47% |
| 9 | 235,197 | 2.85% |
| 10 | 223,320 | 2.71% |
| 11 | 91,978 | 1.11% |
| 12 | 69,778 | 0.85% |
| 13 | 57,952 | 0.70% |
| 14 | 46,822 | 0.57% |
| 15 | 39,635 | 0.48% |
| 16 | 32,168 | 0.39% |
| 17 | 26,933 | 0.33% |
| 18 | 23,131 | 0.28% |
| 19 | 22,027 | 0.27% |
| 20 | 23,953 | 0.29% |
Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.
