According to findings released by Chitika Insights, websites boasting the #1 spot in the Google organic search results receive 33% of the search traffic for a keyword or phrase. This is compared with 18% for the second position. Unfortunately, the market share only goes downhill from there.
Although being on the top spot of any page does positively affect the amount of traffic you receive, nothing matches the impact a first spot on the first page will achieve. For example, the page two traffic share for first and second position drops to 27%, 11.3% respectively.
The report also measures traffic volume between the last position on the a page and the first position on the next page. For example, the sites listed on the last spot of the first page received 2.4% of traffic on average, wheras the first spot on the second page received only 1%.
More significant is the drop in cumulative traffic moving from one page to another. Sites listed on the first Google search results page generate 91.5% of all traffic from an average search. When moving from page one to two, the traffic drops by 95%. Third and fourth page results saw drops of 78% and 58% respectively.
About the research: The report was based on an analysis of tens of millions of online ad impressions in which the user was referred to the page via a Google search. From the referring Google URL, Chitika was able to extract the position that the page was on within the prior search results page. The data was collected between May 21 and May 27, 2013