CheatAd !

Ever wondered how valuable is a top Google spot to your online business? How much a Google top spot is worth? Why not settle at rank 2, 3, 4, or as long as it’s in the first page? Is it really better to spend time and money for Search Engine Optimization to get the Google top spot, or is it just a waste of effort? Can’t Adwords pay-per-click campaign replace the search engine optimization?

The answer is, apparently Ranking #1 worth a lot. That’s what I can say from looking at the Search Query statistics from Google Webmaster Tools.

With the information from the webmaster tools, today we’ll look into how much is the difference between click-trough of different SERP positions and the actual value of Google #1 ranking for one of my website. Currently it gets 40500 visitors (clicks) from 550000 impressions in SERP.

Here is the table of my top 5 keywords (keywords that sent me most traffic, not keywords that are searched most). I have removed the keywords to protect my niche. Note: this is not a branded website, with less than 15% repeat visitors. Thus there is almost zero visitors reaching the site by searching site name.

Let’s take a look at the table. A quick glance can already tell us, rank #1 in Google SERPs give much higher click-through rate (CTR) than rank #2, #3, #4, or further below. In the first keyword, while rank #1 sends 53%, rank #2 sends 26%, which is less than half of rank #1. Rank #3 sends 14% traffic, which is slightly more than a quarter of rank #1 CTR.

In fact, if we look at the other keywords, the difference is even more staggering. Here is average CTR of ranking #1 – rank #5.

As we can see, from the 5 keywords webpages that ranks #1 in Google in average sends a CTR that is more than double rank #2, more than 5 times rank #3, and more than 10 times webpage ranked #4.

From this 5 keywords, my webpages is displayed 24000 times in the search engine result page (SERP). Out of 24000 times displayed, Google searcher clicks on my web links 3420 times. That is an approximate of 14% CTR. Which brings us to the next question.

How much traffic can I get from ranking higher in Google?

If we can get rank #1 consistently for all this 5 keywords, how much more traffic can I get?

Take note the key word here is consistently. As you can see above, Google search rank isn’t fixed for a period of time, as what most of us would have believed. Google keeps on tweaking the result, changing the SERP on daily or even hourly basis, to get the most relevant result on top.

Assuming we manage to be ranked #1 consistently for these 5 keywords, how much visitors can we get from the 24k impressions?

With 51.55% CTR, we will get 12372 visitors coming to the site. That is almost 9k more visitors, or more than 250% difference. The site in our example here gets about 2 pageviews per visitor, with a $3 CPM of Adsense revenue. That will translate to additional 17904 more pageviews and $53 more revenues. Not too bad for just 5 keywords, huh?

Now, that is only for 24k impressions from 5 keywords. Don’t forget this site gets 550k SERP impressions monthly. Applying the CTR of 51.55% to this site, this is what we get:

That’s a 600% more visitors traffic, 600% more pageviews, and 600% more revenues, by ranking #1 in Google for all the targeted keywords / key phrases. That will be an impossible task, but kind of cool, ain’t it?

This is of course too small as sample to be representative. Different niche, language, design, or site model will have differing CTR.

I’m be interested to hear what you have. Go on, check your webmaster tools and share with us in the comment below.