Research and heat map studies once showed that the web page with the top Google ranking receives nearly 50% of all of the clicks for a given search term. According to a more recent study done by Optify, it’s not quite as high as it once was.

Top Google Ranking

Due to changes in people’s searching habits over the past few years since social media has really taken off, this study finds that the average person clicks through to the top Google ranking web page 36.4% of the time. In other words that number has come down quite a bit in recent years.

What is truly alarming is just how far the second ranked website’s click through rate plummets down roughly 66% compared to the first listed site, receiving roughly 12% of all clicks after that.

The rest of those clicks which do not get attributed to the top Google ranking web page go to either the paid ads, Google’s navigational bar on the left, the other organic listings, or someone closing the browser or hitting the back button/performing a new search upon failing to find the results which they were looking for.

When you consider the kind of search volume some keywords get each day, achieving that top slot should be every webmaster’s goal (see how to learn search engine optimization). An effectively monetized website (see how to monetize a website) can earn whoever is sitting on that top Google ranking spot a great deal of money either through their own offers, affiliate offers, or some kind of advertising.

But how can we account for this domination of the number one listed web page for a keyword? People place a great deal of trust automatically in a web page which ranks number one because the assumption is that it’s the most targeted web page for that keyword search, otherwise it wouldn’t be there. A lot of people blindly click on the first page without reading the title (hence the “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature Google is known for) and even if it’s not what they’re looking for, it still receives the click.

Additionally and furthermore, that top ranked website is often ranked at the top for a reason, meaning that Google generally knows what it’s doing so that top spot is laser targeted to the search of the person who is searching and this is apparent in the title of that page, the domain it’s on, and its description, as well.