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Pricing Traffic Share On Google

The top Google listing in organic search results receives 32.5% of the traffic, compared with 17.6% for the second position and 11.4% for No. 3, according to a report. The traffic drops from there.

The findings -- published by Chitika, an online ad network -- demonstrate the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for offline and online business. It analyzes about 300 million U.S. and Canadian page views from May 21-27, to determine the percentage of Google traffic that comes from each position of the search results page.

An updated version of the report lists each rank. For instance, the query ranking in the No. 5 spot in Google search engine queries takes about 6.1% of traffic, followed by No. 7 at 3.5%, No. 8 at 3.1%, No. 9 at 2.6%, and No. 10 at 2.4%. The No. 11 spot falls to 1%, and it gets worse from there.

Behavior suggests that consumers rarely skip past the first few query results, and it has become even rarer to find someone who forges ahead to subsequent pages. You might find it on the desktop, and less on mobile. So I don't have to tell you the importance of optimizing organic results to serve up at the top of the first page -- not only for conversions, but branding too.

Ironically, the results for each position look similar to those published three years ago, which goes to show that while technology changes quickly, the basic optimization strategy remains the same.

Similar to the previous report, the drop in traffic volume between the first and last positions on a page was high. The traffic dropped by 140% from position 10 to position 11, and 86% from 20 to 21. And while traffic volume changed significantly, the drop in cumulative traffic moving from one page to another took a much harder fall.

Sites listed on the first Google search results page generate 92% of all traffic from an average search. When moving from page one to two, the traffic dropped by 95%, and by 78% and 58% for the subsequent pages, according to the report.

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