If you could boil the online marketing technique of search engine optimization (SEO) down to one essential goal, it would be to rank as highly as possible in organic search engine results. SEO is all about isolating specific searches that mean the most to you – like “criminal defense attorney in Boston,” or “Los Angeles personal injury lawyer” – and then making your webpage show up near the top, without paying steep search engine advertising fees that only do so much.
But just how important is this goal? It makes sense that people click on results closest to the top of search results, but exactly how important is it?
Study Shows That More Than Half of Searchers Click on Top Three Results
Online marketing is such a big business. When there’s so much at stake, it’s no surprise that entire companies exist to conduct studies on what web searchers click on. When it comes to which Google results get the highest web traffic, though, what they’ve found is staggering.
A 2014 study, posted on the blog of the behemoth SEO company Moz, found that the top three organic placements in a search results page got more than 55% of the clicks. The top five received a total of 67.6%. Websites not on the first page of the search results, in the aggregate, got less than 6% of the web traffic. Here’s a handy table, showing the results of the Moz study:
| Search Engine Result Placement | Percentage of Clicks |
|---|---|
| 1 | 31.24 |
| 2 | 14.04 |
| 3 | 9.85 |
| 4 | 6.97 |
| 5 | 5.50 |
| 6-10 | 3.73 |
| Page 2 | 3.99 |
| Page 3+ | 1.60 |
It’s clear that being at the top is absolutely crucial to attract web traffic to your law firm’s webpage. But it gets even more obvious if you delve into the numbers.
The Top Result Takes More Than 40% of Organic Result Traffic
Add all of the click percentages in Moz’s study together, and you only come to 76.92%. Nearly a quarter of searches don’t result in a click in an organic result, at all. This could be because searchers end up clicking on paid ads, or not clicking on anything, and instead refining their search or starting over. If you take out all of those possible outcomes, then the top placements in a search engine result page take an even larger ratio:
| Search Engine Result Placement | Percentage of Clicks |
|---|---|
| 1 | 40.61 |
| 2 | 18.25 |
| 3 | 12.80 |
| 4 | 9.06 |
| 5 | 7.15 |
| 6-10 | 4.85 |
| Page 2 | 5.19 |
| Page 3+ | 2.08 |
Every Increase in Search Engine Result Placement is a Big Jump
While sitting in the top spot in a search can get your firm the lion’s share of a search’s web traffic, any upward movement at all comes with a significant increase in the number of visitors to your site. Myers Freelance specializes in writing legal blogs that boost your online presence, increasing your search ranking so you get more web traffic. Once people are viewing your firm’s site, the quality content that Myers Freelance provides pushes them to call your firm, hire your attorneys, and pay for your legal services.
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