Estimating Google website traffic

Position #1 in the SERPS gets a 42% clickthrough rate - is this true?

Everywhere you look online you see the assertion that the number 1 position in the SERPs gets 42% of all the search traffic for that keyword.

A whole industry has been built around this - for instance in Market Samurai's tool, they pull in monthly search data from Google's External Keyword tool for any given keyword, divide by 30 to get a daily number, and then calculate an "SEOT" number (the amount of traffic the top position would get) - and they calculate SEOT by applying a straight 42% to the total daily search number.

But where does this magical 42% number come from?

It goes back to August 2006, when AOL accidently leaked it's search figures. And because AOL's engine is actually powered by Google, people used this as a proxy for what happens on Google. Someone on a forum crunched the numbers for a single keyword, and Seo-scoop.com published it and thus publicised it (it got replicated all over the net). Here's the numbers:

Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100
Click Rank3: 418,643
Click Rank4: 298,532
Click Rank5: 242,169
Click Rank6: 199,541
Click Rank7: 168,080
Click Rank8: 148,489
Click Rank9: 140,356
Click Rank10: 147,551

As you can see the number 1 position doesn't get 42% of the searches, they get 42% of the clicks. Not everyone who searches clicks - sometimes they scan the snippets under the links and decide that it's not what they were looking for, and sometimes the searches are done by internet marketing software checking rankings, so there was never any intention of clicking.

Based on the above data, the number of clicks the top position gets as a percentage of the searches done is 23%. That ties in with my experience - where I'm number 1, I seem to get between 20% and 25% of the number of searches quoted in Google's tool. So if you are looking at the monthly search figures in Google's Keyword Tool, apply 23% to work out the traffic the top position gets, not 42%. It goes to show how important it is to rank for many keywords, especially the long tail, in order to ensure you get sufficient traffic.