I've seen several studies claiming that the #1 organic search position gets more than 30% of all the clicks on the page.

I never believed it (and said so) because it didn't match our experience for ANY of our clients.

I'm talking actual numbers, across a wide range of industries, and national as well as local search.

Consistently, we find #1 or #2 gives a nice bump over being lower on page 1. The top half of page 1 is definitely better than the bottom of page 1. And being lower than page 1? Fuhgeddaboudit!

A new study supports these numbers. The Value of Organic Search Rankings.

Per this study, #1 got 18% of clicks, #2 gets 10%, going down from 7% at #3 to only about 1% for #10.

The big lesson here is to fight the battles you can win. Being #18 for the most competitive term in your industry will get you less traffic than being #1 or #2 for a term that gets less than 1/10th the traffic.

Sure, go for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But that is often a long-term strategy.

Short term, fight the fights you can win.