What a Google position is actually worth — and why third place is the target

The question behind every fix

Your action plan does not list problems. It lists the visits you would gain by fixing them, biggest first, so the top of the list is always the thing worth doing today. To put a number on a fix, SearchDone needs to know one thing: of the people who see your page at a given position on Google, how many click it?

That number is the click-through rate for the position, and it falls off a cliff. The first result takes roughly 28% of clicks. Third place takes about 10%. By tenth it is 1.7%, and past the first page it is a rounding error. Here is the curve the product uses.

The curve, position by position

Your average position is rarely a whole number, so the curve is read between the rows: a page averaging 4.5 is treated as halfway between fourth and fifth, or 6.0%.

Try it on your own numbers

Drag the slider to where you come up for a search that gets about 1,200 looks a month. The figures are the same calculation your action plan makes.

A worked example

Suppose one of your pages shows up at position 8 for a search, and Google showed it 2,000 times last month. At position 8 the curve expects 2.4% of those people to click: about 48 visits. At position 3 it expects 10%, or 200. The difference, 152 visits a month, is the number that appears next to that page in your plan. It is what the fix is worth, and it is why that page sits above a page at position 12 shown 1,500 times, which is worth 134, and below a page at position 12 shown 5,000 times, which is worth 445. Impressions matter as much as position.

Why third place, not first

Every estimate in your plan assumes a successful push reaches position 3, never position 1. First place takes nearly three times the clicks of third, so counting on it would make every opportunity look almost three times bigger than it probably is. A flattering list is a badly ordered list. Third is reachable for a page that already ranks, and using the same target for every page keeps the order honest: the fix that really is worth more stays on top.

What the curve is not

It is a blend of desktop and mobile, drawn from published industry averages, and it is a rule of thumb rather than a measurement of your site. Your real curve depends on your industry, how well people know your name, and what else Google puts on the page: an AI overview, a map, shopping boxes and a video row all take clicks before the first blue link gets any. A page in third place under all of those earns far less than the table says.

So treat the numbers as an ordering, not a forecast. The page shown as worth 152 visits is very probably worth more than the one shown as worth 40. Whether it delivers exactly 152 is not something anyone can promise, which is why SearchDone measures what actually happened after every change instead of asking you to trust the estimate.

What to do with it

• Work from the top of your plan down. The order is the useful output; the exact figure is a guide.
• Pages between positions 4 and 20 for a search with real volume are the cheapest wins on any site. You already rank; you need a nudge, not a new page.
• A page in the top ten that gets far fewer clicks than its position predicts is nearly always a title and description problem, not a page problem. That is a rewrite of two lines, and SearchDone can make it for you.

The thresholds that decide which pages get into the plan at all are in the next piece, and the full set of checks is on the how the checks work page.