Catalyst has just published a report documenting the average click rate for each organic position in Google.

The ctrs range from 17.16% if you’re the #1 ranking site, down to 0.51% if your ranked 10th.

They’ve even broken down the stats for branded v unbranded keywords, query length etc.

You can read an article on their findings – with a link to the free download – here:

http://moz.com/blog/mission-imposserpble-2-user-intent-click-through-rates

Why Unbranded Gets A Higher CTR

One of their findings was that the #1 site gets a higher ctr for “unbranded” searches, than for “branded” searches.

Catalyst were “shocked” by this. I wasn’t.

The vast majority of unbranded searches are non-commercial searches. And, for those keywords, there will usually be no Adwords ads at the top of the page.

For commercial searches – e.g. “Hotpoint ovens” – the first 3 listings on the page will be Adwords ads. These ads – plus the ones on the right side – will attract the majority of the clicks, resulting in fewer clicks on the organic listings.

And this gets me to the point I want to make: this report lumps together commercial and non-commercial search queries and gives us averages. Unfortunately, these averages aren’t useful.

If you’re marketing with SEO, you’re going to be optimising for commercial keywords. So, in trying to work out how much traffic you’ll get from those keywords, you’d want to know what the average click rates are for commercial keywords.

Until someone does that, we need to treat studies like this as interesting, rather than useful.

Steve

Categories: google