Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Surveys & Statistics’ Category

Everybody knows that getting on the number one position in any of the search engines, and especially the big G, has its rewards in the form of lots and lots of (if you’ve done your keyword research correctly) very valuable and free targeted traffic.

Whats frustrating to most though is how much traffic?  Keyword estimation tools such as Keyword Discovery, and Wordtrackergive you a rough guesstimate of how much traffic a certain keyword generates overall but does not tell you how that figure is broken down.

Luckily, there are a few studies out there that have estimated the click through rates on the various positions in the search engines (mainly Google).  SEOmoz, estimates clickthrough rates for SERPS as follows:

While another study conducted by a group of students at New York’s Cornell University predicts the following clickthrough rates in the Google SERPS (search engine results pages):

• Position 1 receives 56.36% of the clicks

• Position 2 receives 13.45% 

• Position 3 receives 9.82%

• Position 4 receives 4.00%

• Position 5 receives 4.73%

• Position 6 receives 3.27%

• Position 7 receives 0.36%

• Position 8 receives 2.91%

• Position 9 receives 1.45%

• Position 10 receives 2.55%

As you can see, the above SERP clickthrough estimates show that ranking above the fold -and especially in the top 3 positions- generates between 60 to 80% of all possible clickthroughs for any keyword.

Lesson to take from this post..make sure you (or your seo agency) make efforts to rank above the fold (top 3 serp positions), anything less is just not good enough!

Up to one quarter of searches on Google are ‘new to google’ searches. 

Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Search Quality at a recent conference said that “20 to 25% of the search queries Google receives every day are being seen by Google for the first time”

This is an interesting stat as it highlights the sophistcation of searchers when performing a search query on Google or any of the other search engines.

Manber also gave examples of how Google will be handling peoples queries in the search box as follows:

• “How much does it cost for an exhaust system” will pull up results from “cost of an exhaust system.”

• “Overhead view of bellagio pool” will pull up results from “bellagio pool pictures.”

• “Fedora 5 losing network connections” will pull up results from “fedora 5 network configuration.”

The thing to take from all of this is that search is developing and developing fast.  The way people are searching is also changing at a fast pace therefore optimising search (both paid and organic) need to take into consideration these satistics and  include them into the overall search optimisation strategy.

In an effort to better penetrate the Chinese market, Google has partnered with the Chinese portal Sina to offer search facilities to its 230 Million registered users.

The partnership is aimed at gaining market share over Baidu the dominant search provider in China.

Replacing Lost Market Share?

Google’s move is especially important given that last month, Netease,  one of Google’s largest search partners decided to abandon Google for it own search engine technology. 

Chinese Market Share for Search

According to a recent study, Baidu controls 56.8% of the total search market while Google owns 32.8% of total Chinese searches.  Yahoo controls 5% of the total Chinese market for searches with the remaider split among the other search engines including MSN and ASK.

Google now accounts for 67 percent of all worldwide search queries, according to a March 2007 ComScore update. This is up from 66.3 percent the previous month.

Yahoo dropped to 18.8% from 19.2% while MSN and other engines such as ASK amounted to 7.7%.

US Search Statistics

According to Comscore, 7.3 billion searches were conducted in the US in March. Google accounted for 3.5 billion searches; Yahoo - 2 billion; MSN – 798 million;  Ask.com - 379 million; AOL – 368 million search queries.