Someone’s done some research into the number of clicks resulting from different types of Google search, and the results are illuminating. I also spy an opportunity. In Which Keywords Have The Worst CTR? on the Siege Media blog, we can see that 792,000 searches asking for a translation resulted in just 154,000 clicks, while 126,000 searches asking for recipes resulted in over 144,000 clicks.

So what does this mean? Well, I’m assuming that the number of clicks is low for ‘translations’ because Google gives you the translation in the results – you don’t actually need to click on a result. Conversely, ‘recipes’ generates more clicks than searches because many searchers click through to several results.

It’s a common mistake to think that appearing at the top of a Google search results page is going to get you as many clicks as there are searches. You may be able to find examples in your own Google Search Console of searches where you appear, on average, at average position ‘1.0’, yet the click-through rate is 10% or less. For AdWords adverts at the top of the page, the click-through rate can be as low as 1%. It doesn’t matter, because you don’t pay when people don’t click, but if you think about it, that’s astonishingly low.

Going back to the research above, however, highlights at least one real opportunity. “How to…” searches produce only a 50% click-through rate on average. If some people click on more than one result, it means that more than half don’t find what they want at all. And I suspect you’ll be able to find examples of poor results in your area. What do your products actually do? If you can answer that, you can think up a “How to…” question where your products are the answer. Now search for that, and see if that question is being answered in the Google results. If it isn’t, you can go straight to the top with a new article on your website which could probably be dashed off in 30 minutes.