93% of all buying decisions start with an online search

Jeffbullas.com has a great blog on Search Engine Optimization and the importance of ranking well in Search Engines. There are some powerful statistics. Here’s an excerpt:

It is now known to be absolutely critical as research shows that 93% of all buying decisions start with an online search.

To put this into some perspective here are some statistics regarding click through traffic based upon the position that a page receives when entered into a search engine (this is from a study leaked from AOL’s search engine logs):

1. The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
2. The second position receives 11.94%
3. Third position on the first page obtains 8.47%
4. The fourth placed position on page one receives 6.05%
5. The others on the first page are under 5% of click through traffic
6. The first ten results (page one ) received 89.71% of all click-through traffic,
7. The next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4.37%
8. Third page receives a total of 2.42 %
9. The fifth page receives a total of only 1.07%
10. All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks.

Read the whole blog post here….