If you remember on August 4, 2006, AOL released to the public a search data that contained twenty million search keywords made by 658,000 users over a 3-month period on one of its websites.

The data was purely intended for research and it doesn't contain any personally identifiable information. However when the New York Times was able to track individual users by cross referencing the data with phonebook records, things began to heat up. The event finally reached its climax when user No. 4417749 was identified as Thelma Arnold of Lilburn, Georgia, and whose search queries include "womens underwear" and "dog that urinates on everything", suffice to say the gaffe was identified. Lawsuits soon followed public outrage, resignations and firings, and the AOL search data was promptly taken off the internet.

However, the gaffe wasn't without its good points. In fact, the data was simply invaluable at the time because was the very first to provide a large sample made over a considerable amount of time-three months of search data. Plus, knowing that AOL's search engine uses Google's indices, it provided interesting insights on how users interact with the world's leading search engine.

And the findings are interesting. About 47% of searches returned zero clicks, supporting the notion that many users, when they don't find what they're looking for on the first search, would prefer to refine their search query and try again-rather than clicking through page two or three on the search result pages.

Furthermore, it was also found out that 90% of the clicks were made on the first page, and a mere 4% of user clicks are on the second page.

The iCrossing Research

In February 2010, iCrossing, a digital marketing company, made research on keyword queries and natural search trends for non-branded keywords. From 10 major clients across several verticals, they analyzed only non-branded natural search results of nearly and reported that 95% of all search engine traffic from comes from page one of the SERPs.

Visits by SERP across the "Big Three" engines
Figure courtesy of iCrossing

While iCrossing's data was specific to only unbranded keywords (they filtered out branded terms), their findings reflects the analyses on the AOL data leak that has been made countless of times. After nearly 5 years, it's still Page One or bust.

To break down iCrossing data would be as follows:

• There are 8.9 million non-branded search queries tracked in this study
• 8.5 search queries resulted in page one clicks
• 232,000 search queries resulted in page two clicks
• 180,000 search queries resulted in page three clicks

To put things into perspective, unless your website is sitting on Page One of the search engine results page, you won't be reaching the 8.5 million, or 95% of your prospective customers. Instead, your website will be fighting for scraps with the rest of the competition not in page one.

You might ask: if my website ranks at page two or three, should I still bother with the site? Certainly, that's because search engine indices are updated regularly, and some that are on page one will get bumped lower by emerging websites.

If your website shows promise, then it is a prime candidate for extra optimization focus in order to push it higher in rank and finally to page one. Contact us, we can help you push higher in the SERPs.

Reference: The Importance of Page-One Visibility