SEO expert Brian Dean (“Backlinko”) analyzed 5 million Google search results provided by Clickflow. He was mainly interested in quantifying and qualifying CTR data. One question among others was how clicks on the first page of Google SERPS are being distributed among the respective positions.
Furthermore, Backlinko used factors like title tag length, the emotional quality of the title text as well as the use of the meta descriptions to get insights about their influence on the results.
To be more accurate they analyzed CTR data across 874,929 pages and 5,079,491 search queries.
They found out that the first position gets nearly one-third of the organic clickthroughs, exactly 31,7%, which is a remarkable but for insiders not too surprising number. Compared to the tenth position it is ten times more likely that people click on the link of the leading position.
Another interesting observation is, that there is no substantial difference between the click rates on positions seven to ten. On the other hand, every higher position in the range of positions one to six means an important increase in the click rate and will so deliver a lot more traffic than the position below.
Below the line, this means that “on average, moving up 1 spot in the search results will increase CTR by 30.8%.” Compared to page one of the SERPS Click-Through-Rates starting on the 2nd page are extremely low. Only “0.78% of Google searchers clicked on something from the second page”.
Brain Dean also went into details about their finding that you might want to study, it´s worth it.
Takeaways For Your Onpage Optimization
Here are my personal takeaways from reading Backlinko´s results everyone can use for on-page optimization operations:
- Be emotional in your title tags.
- Always use a meta description.
- Definitely use a keyword in your URL. The observed CTR was 45% higher! This one is huge.
- Think again about using power words in your title: words like secret, powerful, ultimate, insane or amazing actually decreased the measured CTR by 13.9%.
- Not too bad if you can limit your title tag length to between 15 and 40 characters. This outperforms longer and shorter text by 8,6%. When you want to get better rankings for several long-tail keywords on one page then you might think about that again – my two cents.
- Turn your title text into a question. 14,7% higher CTRs make this a meaningful tactic.
- Work involved in getting a better ranking above position 5 can be a very good investment.
- Most users even focus on the first five positions. Work involved in getting a better ranking above position 5 can be a very good investment.
- Concentrate on the long-tail keywords in the beginning as by far most of the keywords that a site ranks for are “long tails with low search volume”. Far more than 60% of all search engine queries receive less than 10 impressions
- Your final optimization goal for organic rankings might be to arrive among the top 3 in the SERPS as those get 75% of the clicks.
The Top Ten CTR According To The Backlinko Study Of 2019
Last but not least for your notes find below the specific CTR for the top 10 positions according to the ClickFlow research
1. 31,73%
2. 24,71%
3. 18,66%
4. 13,60%
5. 9,51%
6. 6,23%
7. 4,15%
8. 3,12%
9. 2,97%
10. 3,09%
Good inspiration for SEOs and their clients for streamlining their work.
