However, let’s put this aspect aside for today. I just want to talk about not necessarily traditional organic results, but not sponsored results. So what’s actually in the top spot, excluding ads?
Well, most of the time, about two-thirds of the time, it’s actually organic and regular, your 10 blue links. This surprised me. I don’t know if it’s rejection. I don’t know if it’s because the ads are always there, so I don’t notice. But yeah, most of the time, you’re actually looking at organic in the first position. When you’re not looking at organic, you’re looking at a lot of other features, some of which are in play, some of which aren’t.
So Knowledge Graph, maybe for a branded term or something, but you can’t actually appear in the Knowledge Graph, and that’s the second biggest result.
Local, of course, you can appear local, and that’s 7%. So that’s a big chunk of what’s left.
Images, in a way yes, as if it were an organic image search, although the click-through rate you will get is very open to debate.
Found on the web, this is a new feature that came out of nowhere in the last year. It’s a bit of a hybrid between Featured Snippets and the Knowledge Graph. Then you can click to a website from this. It’s in play.
And then Other, and Other includes many things. Probably the most important are things like videos, which, again, maybe you could have from your brand’s YouTube channel or something like that.
The way this tends to work, sort of another way of saying the same statistic, two-thirds organic, is that the average first organic result score tends to be about 1.5 on desktop or about 2 on mobile. So it doesn’t seem surprising, like, oh, the average score you could get by ranking first is 1.5.
But it’s actually not that bad when you consider how many other types of results are available.
So, as I said at the beginning, I think there’s some good news here, and there’s some less good news.
You can appear
So the silver lining is, like I just said, you can appear. Most are organic. A lot of what isn’t organic is stuff where you can actually appear as a brand.
But not everywhere
What’s not so good is that it’s not universally true. So, like I said, some of these features, like the Knowledge Graph, for example, are not that easy to visualize. And actually, even a lot of organic positions aren’t really in play yet.