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Ben Hollom – Marketing Director, M2 Bespoke
By Ben Hollom
The importance of search engine ranking is one of the key concepts of SEO and everyone involved in the business is well aware of that fact. A recent study from Bing revealed just how important it is to get a top ranking and puts figures behind the theory.
Writing on the official Bing blog spot, Dr Ronny Kohavi of Bing´s Research & Development team, gave more details about the impact of high rankings. Results from the study showed that more than 50% of Bing users click the first result. However, this figure rises sharply and reaches more than three-quarters, if the first result also includes deep links.
Looking further down the search engine results page, figures drop dramatically. Bing found that only between 4% and 6% click on the third result, depending on whether it is a regular page link or an Instant Answer, while the fourth gets attention from just about 2% – 3% of users.
However, statistics are quite different, when users return to the search result page by hitting the back button, Kohavi explained. When a user visits a page but does not find what they were looking for, they hit the back button and continue looking down the list. In such cases, click-through rates for lower results increase five to eight times, he said.
The blog post noted that Bing is rolling out a change to its search results page. For certain queries, the search engine will only show four search results and will later display up to 14 results if users click the back button.
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