Ricky Bobby once said ”If you ain’t first, you’re last.”   This is quite true when it comes to getting the most traffic from your Google rankings.

The folks at Blogstorm.co.uk reported that in April Google began testing their new AJAX SERPs, and then followed up the post at the end of April with a step-by-step guide to modifying your Google Analytics setup to track rankings with each referring keyword.  Sooooo sweet.

At SIM we use Omniture (not giving them a link here because they sneakily added a link to their site within our code…see this article) for the majority of our sites but decided to test out G Analytics recently on one of our smaller properties.  Just last week we followed Blogstorm’s instructions and got the keyword ranking tracking set up as well.   Extremely cool data.  Below is a snapshot for a relatively small time period and even though it is a small sample set I think the data is telling.

Here are a few nuggets:

• The #1 ranking accounts for 65% of keyword referrals and 66% of visits
• Top 3 rankings account for 81% of all keyword referrals and 82% of all visits
• Top 5 rankings account for 90% of keyword referrals and 90% of visits
• Top 10 rankings account for 98% of keyword referrals and 98% of visits
• Rankings 6-10 only accounted for 8% of keyword referrals and 8% of visits

The data isn’t perfect, but it is certainly interesting and opens the doors for more research.  We don’t know the total number of rankings for each position or as a whole and therefore there could be a higher percentage of #1 rankings which would explain the high number of referrals for that position.  The data above becomes valuable if we obtained those rankings or if we were to assume, yes I know what assuming does, that there were an even number of rankings at each SERP position.  This would confirm the power of obtaining that #1 spot in the search results.  It would also shed light on how useless it is to be on the second page and how little value there is in being listed anywhere from #6 to #10.

With this data we can:

1. Calculate the opportunity cost of being ranked in positions 6-10 or in positions 11-20.
2. Calculate how long it will take to see a ROI if we were to invest in pushing our listing higher for a specific keyword.

A similarly interesting study would be to track referrals from each SERP position for a given keyword.  This would give us insight into CTR per position, how brands play a role in CTR, and if the keyword type plays any role.  The challenge here is that it requires you to either a) have enough sites that you have complete coverage of the first page, or b) track the keyword long enough that it bounces around to each listing.

Oh wait, I do have this data….post coming soon.