If your website ranks better in Google, you’ll get more clicks – it’s no big secret. But how much difference does it make being the number one site on search pages? Our Manchester A&I team figured it was time to investigate.

There have been several studies around this area, but no-one really knows for sure. So, as we’re not the type of agency to follow in the footsteps of others, we decided a different approach was needed. By expanding the research and look at the effect that brand terms (e.g. “Coke”, “Nike”, “Apple”) and non-brand terms (e.g. “soft drinks”, “trainers”, “smartphones”) have on the click through rate (CTR), we turned out some pretty surprising results.

Initially, we discovered that non-brand terms get on average half the number of clicks as branded terms do in position one. This can be explained when we look at how users tend to search for non-brand terms in the early stages of research, whereas users searching for brand terms tend to be clearer about what their intention is. Therefore non-brand searches are likely to yield clicks throughout the search results page, and brand searches tend to have clicks concentrated to the top three results at the top of the page.

There were also anomalies in the data which couldn’t be explained by experimental error. The chart above shows our data in orange, plotted with a previous study in blue by Optify – a B2B Internet Marketing Software company.

Position 5 has a low CTR in comparison which may be a feature born from the new types of listing (places, video, news, etc.) affecting the positioning within Google. An example of this using the search term “nike” can be found below. In this example the listing in position 2 will likely have a CTR equivalent to a position 5 or 6 from a traditional SERP as spatially it is very low down. The data used for this research was limited to certain business sectors and suitable keywords therefore anomalies (like position 5) are inevitable – however we can provide valuable insights to our client who may not be seeing the traffic they’d expect from a certain position.

Here in Manchester we have a great team of SEO’s working hard to push our clients higher in the organic listings for relevant keywords to gain more and better quality traffic.