How much are your poor search rankings costing you?

Earlier this year, Optify released a very detailed search rankings white paper.

While it’s pretty obvious that the top sites on Google get more clicks, you might be surprised and even a little scared by the actual click through numbers.

What this means is websites with a #1 rank get clicked on 36.4% of the time, #2 gets 12.5%, #3 gets 9.5% of the clicks and so on.

And to further clarify, out of 100 searches, the #1 spot would click clicked 36 times.

What this means for your business? Two things really stand out.

A #1 ranking gets almost 66% more clicks than #2.
89% of web surfers click results from the first page. So if you aren’t on page 1, you stand very little chance of being found at all.

Now because I love math, let’s see how this breaks down in dollar amounts over the course of 1 year.

I’ll be real modest here and say you have a #5 ranking site and you’re getting 6.1% clicks pretty steadily over the year. How much more will you make than if you were say…. #11. First ranking on page #2 of Google (2.6% clicks). Doesn’t sound like a bad position to be in but let’s see:

For a search term that gets 3,000 searches a day, the difference in traffic would be 183 vs 78. That’s a 134.6% difference in visitors! Over the course of a year, that would be 66,795 visitors vs 28,475.A difference of 38,320 visitors. Depending on how much profit you make per visitor, you can imagine how much money you’re losing out on! And this is for only ONE TERM on only ONE of the search engines!

What if your business has no search marketing at all and you don’t even rank #11? Scary thought right there.

One final thing worth noting is that while rankings ARE important, they aren’t everything. If you’re going after the WRONG keywords, a #1 ranking could mean very little to your business. But that’s why we exist ^__~