Three hard facts: 1. Google totally dominates the search engine traffic in Australia 2. The statistics show virtually nobody looks on page 2 of the rankings when they are searching for something 3. The amount of traffic to even less popular phrases through Google searches is now in the 100′s a month and in many cases 10,000′s a month. Most industries have some phrases with 1,000′s of searches a month.
These figures are only growing
- as broadband gets more extensive
- the younger generations have never even heard of the Yellow Pages nevermind have any interest in it
- the Iphone has brought internet accessibility to a whole new level
So now lets examine the typical distribution curve for the search engine results pages. Firstly it is very rare to hear of a company who’s only presence on page 1 of a search phrase is in the Google maps section getting much traffic from it. The Click through rates are very low. However coupled with a site’s presence on page 1 for a particular search term there is an incremental impact.What is more relevant is the distribution of clicks from position 1 through to 10. It wouldn’t surprise anybody to realise that the 1st ranked site gets the most, but how much more? In 2007 AOL who had many years of extensive records in their database having run one of the longest established Search Engines in the world from way before Google was even a twinkle in his mother’s eye, mistakenly leaked the distribution of their clicks. Very few people took any notice but those who wanted to get deeper into what Google’s rankings mean in business terms to a site, took these figures and used them as a bible from which to make projections. As i say these figures were built from the database of AOL and are more a study of human behaviour than anything but the best study that we have to work with. Tommorrow i will go through the numbers to show you what it means in general terms to be on page 1 of Google
