Web SEO: Count your chicks, er...clicks before they hatch

Survey says...
...Put your SEO program into perspective!

A recent article by Rob Garner from iCrossing says his company just released a study on SERP (search engine results pages) click rates, indicating the sites surveyed received more than 95% of all their non-branded natural search traffic from page-one across all three major engines. The data included 8.9 million queries sampled over nine months, representing 10 enterprise-level Web sites in different diverse verticals.

According to the survey, when looking at all three search engines, SERP click rates were within a razor-thin margin from engine to engine. Google provided the highest average; with 95.8% coming from page one, compared to Yahoo at 95.2%, and Bing at an average of 95% (total average of 95.3%).

It also found that most travel sites had the highest percentage of non-branded page-one traffic at more than 97% and businesses that focused primarily on health and insurance had the lowest percentage of first-page traffic at 93%.

Out of the almost nine million searches surveyed, queries break out across three major engines as follows:

• More than 8.5 million non-branded natural clicks came from page one across all three engines
• 232,000 clicks came from page two
• 180,000 came from page three

When thinking of people searching for a site on the Internet, there is one key thing that puts your search engine optimization program into perspective: For first impressions and ultimate clicks, count your SEO chickens on the first page.