The #1 Result in Google Gets 31.7% of Clicks, New Study by Backlinko and ClickFlow Finds

The #1 result in Google’s search results receives 31.7% of all clicks, according to a new industry study by ClickFlow and Backlinko.

The study, which analyzed over 5 million Google search results, also found that only .78% of Google users go to the second page of the results.

Marketing Technology News: Recurrent Dynamics Disrupts the AI Ecosystem with Breakthrough Training Approach

The primary goal of this study was to help search engine optimization (SEO) professionals better understand how Google users interact with the search results.

To better understand what people click on in the search results, ClickFlow and Backlinko analyzed Google Search Console data from 874,929 unique URLs. These URLs collectively ranked for 5,079,491 search queries.

Marketing Technology News: Daily MarTech Roundup: The 5 Coolest Things in Marketing and Sales Today

Additionally, this joint ClickFlow and Backlinko study also analyzed several factors that impact click-through-rate (CTR) in Google’s organic results.

Impact of Question-Based Title Tags: This industry study discovered that titles that contain a question have a 14% higher CTR compared to those that aren’t question-based.

Keyword-Rich URLs: URLs that contained the search term had a 45% higher click-through-rate vs. those results without that keyword in their URL. This finding is in-line with the SEO best practice of using keyword-rich URLs whenever possible.

Impact of Sentiment: According to this study, highly-emotional titles result in a higher average CTR compared to title tags with a neutral sentiment. Therefore, using titles with a strong positive or negative sentiment may result in more clicks from Google searchers.

Impact of Higher Rankings: The study found that moving up one position in the search results correlated with a 3.8% average increase in clicks. However, this increase was not evenly distributed across the first page. The data showed that moving from position 3 to 2 resulted in a significantly higher CTR lift than moving up from position 6 to 5.

Unique Meta Descriptions: Pages with a meta description got approximately 6% more clicks compared to those that were missing a description. This suggests that writing a unique meta description for every page on a website may help improve search engine traffic to that page.

Ideal Character Count: The data showed that title tags that contained 15 to 40 characters had the highest overall CTR.

Marketing Technology News: Nuxeo Announces New Connectors and a Bolstered AI Framework for its Content Services Platform