What your search engine ranking really means

What does your search engine ranking position mean to your business? The answer is everything.

Let's take a look at the click through percentage of each ranking position using 3 different sets of data. The interesting thing to note is that while the data was collected in very different ways, the results are very similar.

The first set is from AOL. They accidentally released search result data in 2006. You can read more at TechCrunch.

The second set was compiled by Andrew Gerhart using actual Google Analytics data.

The third is from a study performed at Cornell University.

Notice that if you are not in the top 10, you don't have a chance of getting any significant traffic from the search engines. Also, if you are not in the top 3, your traffic is greatly diminished.