I thought I would write a quick post sharing some quick things you can do to get a sense of where your website currently sits on Google and how your Google position correlates to potential search traffic (and leads).
Figure out your top keywords
What are the top keywords that people are likely to search for in Google when looking for a business e.g. for a plumber it might be “plumber vancouver”, “plumber near me”, “emergency plumber”. Write those down.
Next step we’ll see what page 1 looks like for those searches
Open up your favorite browser and make sure to use the private browser mode – in Chrome select “New Incognito Window”, in Opera its “New Private Window”. If you don’t do this then the results you get will also incorporate recent searches (which usually includes your own website), giving you false readings.
Now, take a look through the results on the page, first you will see some ads (placed by businesses paying for Google Ads), then the map pack (a mini map with 3 listings) – see if you appear in this block, if you do then that’s great as that gets a bigger share of the clicks.
Next up is the organic results – as I speak today there are 10 organic results listed, sometimes the number differs as Google tries out new layouts – this block is where you ideally want to see your web site listed.
Following this block you will sometimes see another block of 3 ads listed.
Now I have some additional tools which show me the number of searches those keywords get, in my example “plumber vancouver” gets 3,600/mo, here are some other examples of traffic for related keywords:
This is where it gets interesting, there have been a lot of studies conducted to determine how the click distribution goes across those search results listed on page 1 and beyond. This recent study shows the click distribution nicely across page 1:
In a nutshell it says that position 1 of the organic results gets 34.2% of the clicks, whereas position gets just 2.6%
This next study shows the difference between page 1 clicks and the other pages.
The graph I pulled from the study is super powerful – it shows how positions 1-10 on the first page of Google get the vast majority of clicks – so much that less than 1% of clicks occur on page 2 onwards.
Putting this into some perspective with my keyword example above – 3,600 people search for “plumber vancouver” per month, lets say 1000 of those end up clicking a website. That would mean that only 78 of those clicks would occur on page 2 onwards whereas 922 would occur on page 1!
Even worse, or better depending on where you sit – position 1 on page 1 gets around 30% of those clicks so 300 clicks!! If you’re a plumber on page 2 then your competitor on page 1 could be getting 300 clicks versus your 78 clicks per month (and those 78 clicks are spread across everyone on page 2 onwards so its not even 78 clicks).