Why You Must be the First?
People always say that you need to be in the first page of results in Google if you want to receive clicks, right? Well, this will hurt, but the reality is that merely being in the first page is not enough. In fact, if you are around the lowest positions, you could end up getting a meager 1% of the overall clicks on searches for those keywords.
This is a very hot topic, but strangely there it not a large amount of research around it. The most reliable study so far comes from an eye tracking technology to discover what percentage of users would click on each of the 10 results appearing on the first page of Google for certain topics. The results, at least my opinion, are pretty shocking, as the image below illustrates (image via SEO Researcher):
It is a pity that we don’t have more data to confirm those numbers (if you do please share with me). Google would be in a very good position to find out these patterns, but I guess they have no interest to reveal them.
There are increasing returns as you move up into the first page of results. if you are aiming to get organic traffic, therefore, you need to appear in the first position for your target keywords!
