If your website’s content doesn’t rank on the very first search engine results page (SERP) of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or any other search engine, it may as well not exist for most people.
Not only that. Even on SERP page one, there are sharply diminishing returns, in terms of click-through rate (CTR) for all search results after the top result. That means that ranking fifth or sixth instead of second or third can be the difference between being seen and being invisible.
Sistrix has captured this phenomenon nicely in the following chart, which tracks CTR by ranking position:
Over one-quarter of Google users click the first organic search result, or twice as many who click the second-ranking result. Similarly, Backlinkto has also found that the top three organic search results collectively get three-fourths of all clicks.
These numbers, plus the growing complexity of SERP pages due to featured snippets, video results and other “position zero” results, underscore the importance of search engine positioning.
Search engine positioning is the optimization of …