AOL research was leaked to the public and we finally have an excellent answer to the age old question, "How many people click on the site ranked #X?"

This first graph breaks down the clicks that each of the first 5 pages receives. As you can easily see, the 1st Page is the Holy Grail. Plus, if you aren't on any of the first 5 pages, then you may as well forget about seeing traffic for that search term.



This second graph shows the percentage of clicks that each of the first 10 sites receive. In other words, it is a detailed breakdown of the first page of rankings. It is no suprise to see that the number 1 ranked site gets the most hits, but it is a suprise to see that the number 1 ranked site dominates the clicks by so much.


What does this all mean?
I think anyone can tell it's important to be on the first page and also important to be ranked 1st. Studies have also shown the users have more confidence in Google, which means that Googe searchers may click on the #1 ranked site even MORE OFTEN. This also means that you should be extra careful about the keyword terms you chose to focus your SEO campaign on. If you have a new site, you're not going to rank on the 1st page for a competitive term like "mortgages", but maybe you can rank on the first page for "egg harbor township mortgages."