I thought I would share this chart from SEOmoz showing the click through rate of average (I think the sample was 10,000 results) SERPs. First the obvious stuff: obviously position 1 is going to result in the most clicks and obviously there is going to be a massive decline as a user gets further down the rankings.
There is another point to make – not sure whether this can sit under the category of obvious but there are limitless search queries and this data is only a sample to there has been no consideration for long tail or short tail keyphrases.
What about the not-obvious stuff? The thing that I find very interesting is that there is a better click through rate on the second page than there is at the bottom of the first. Now yes, this is the entire second page but I’ve got to believe that 90% of the clicks on the second page are given to the top results.
Actually when you think about this it makes sense – the top of the page is the top of the page, if a user is willing to make the action to go to the second page they are going to engage with what they see first.
What do you think – does this indicate that there is traffic opportunity at the top of the second page or is it impossible to give an average CTR because of the huge diversity of search queries?