The question of what difference being ranked first in Google makes is on the mind of everyone who cares for making a profit on the Internet.
The question of what difference being ranked first in Google makes is on the mind of everyone who cares for attracting online traffic and making a profit on the Internet. Who wouldn't like to get flat facts about what increase in the number of visitors going up from second to top on the search engine results page represents? Who wouldn't want to have some hard evidence to back the idea of pursuing the ultimate goal of becoming number one for a specific keyword? Wouldn't it be nice to know numerical values, in terms of traffic and income, that separate sites ranked for the same term?
It surely would, but the rub is that these data are more difficult to come by than you could have thought. One reason why is that key players in the search engine industry like to see this information as sensitive and protect it accordingly. Second, there is very little as far as reliable measurement tools are concerned, so obtaining large and representative datasets which could help paint a bigger picture and make future predictions is a hassle. What is left, then, is intuition or imperfect methods based on deduction and triangulation of available indicators from metrics applications, like Google Analytics.
It is largely instinctive to strive for domination in Google and businesses are willing to pay top dollar to achieve the highest visibility in the most popular search engine. This intuition is underpinned by the fact that more searchers pay attention to organic search results than to paid ads and by a natural inclination to give priority to things listed or considered as first. In fact, the eye-tracking research by Enquiro has proven what many had sensed before – attention drops the further down you go on the page and the ad area is much less of a magnet for visitors. Another study by Cornell University found that the first two listings capture over a half of users' eye fixation, split nearly evenly between the two in terms of time, but the first one gets over four times more in terms of clicks. It seems most Web users, just like others in other situations, stick to default solutions instead of investing effort in individual investigations. In one study, researchers intervened by reversing the order of the top two listings and the new first one attracted vastly superior traffic again.
Available statistics seems to corroborate intuition even more. One SEO blogger reported an incident when Google did some random reshuffling of its rankings, which affected one of the websites he used to manage. It went down from the top to the runner-up position for several days. The standard daily traffic of 30k unique visits by Google organic search referrals dropped to about 12k, which represents a steep 60% decrease in activity, even though the site managers noticed no real shift in its environment that could affect actual relevancy. Another calculation, based on leaked AOL search data and other available indicators, returned comparable results for a different keyword, bingo cards. While being ranked 5th meant 6k unique visitors per month, topping Google's results page would produce approximately 50k monthly visitors, an 8,5 times increase. Needless to say, this directly translates into income generation.
Obviously, exact numbers differ from keyword to keyword, each one having unique potential to attract visitors, but there is no denying the fact that the closer you are to the top of the list, the bigger (by far) the share of the pie you can count on.