The Top Search Positions Get All The Traffic

The Relationship Between Search Position and CTR

According to research conducted by Atlas Institute and others, the click-through rate (CTR) of the natural search listing for a given keyword or phrase follows a mathematical relationship known as Zipf's Law. Ziph's Law states that in the results to any given search, the listing ranked second has half as many click-throughs as the first, the 3rd ranked listing has 1/3 as many as the first, the 4th has ¼ as many, and so on.

The resulting mathematical model allows us to predict the number of clicks for any position in the search listings, which we have graphed for the first 50 positions in the figure below. For example, if your company is ranked 1st, you can expect to

receive about 18% of all click-throughs for a given search term, whereas, if you are 12th, you can expect to receive just 1.6% of all click-throughs for that same term. Viewed another way, the competitors ranked above you will get just over 300 click-throughs all together, while your site will receive 8.

The implications of this steep fall-off in traffic is clear - to get the most traffic from search positions you need to be in the top few listings! Stated another way, the difference between being in the top 5 listings (a.k.a. "above the fold") and first on the second page of results is HUGE - a factor of 10 times the traffic. So the investment in SEO to move up the rankings has tremendous leverage on your lead flow from a given search position.

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