Posted on Aug 11.06 to Search, Online Marketing |   

SEO Black Hat has a great post and tool up today that extrapolated clickshare by ranking percentages from the leaked AOL search data. Clickshare is the percentage of total search volume that clicks on a particular position in the SERPs. According to his data, 41.1% of all searchers click on the first result.

I went ahead and graphed the distribution curve of these numbers, and a modified cumulative percentage curve, and it looks like our much beloved pareto curve. I said “modified” cumulative curve, because the first 10 positions only get a little over 80% of the total traffic, so the cumulative curve is based on only those searchers who click on a result in the top 10.

(the top line is the cumulative curve, and the bottom line the distribution)

The disproportionate amount of traffic the first and second positions get is a little surprising, and certainly makes it clear how important it is to not only be in the top 10, but in the top 2.