There is an old joke within SEO circles (so old that many people will roll your eyes if you say it), that the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google. This originated in an article in the Huffington Post way back in 2014.
It is highlighting the stark reality that not many people venture past the first page when searching, and therefore, nobody will ever see you if your website features on page 2 of the results. After all, when was the last time you went to page 2?
So, how many people actually are venturing past page 1?
Lets Look At The Numbers
So, how many people venture past the first results page of Google? Google don’t publish official figures, and the numbers do vary, but a comprehensive study by Firstpagesage found that around less than half of one percent of users go to the second page when searching!
To give more context, below are the estimated number of clicks each search position gets on Google:
| Page | Position | Clicks % |
| 1 | 1 | 39.80% |
| 1 | 2 | 18.70% |
| 1 | 3 | 10.20% |
| 1 | 4 | 7.20% |
| 1 | 5 | 5.10% |
| 1 | 6 | 4.40% |
| 1 | 7 | 3.00% |
| 1 | 8 | 2.10% |
| 1 | 9 | 1.90% |
| 1 | 10 | 1.60% |
| 2 | All | 0.44% |
Of course the 0.44% of searches going to page 2 is an arresting number. But what is just as interesting is the massive drop off in clicks you will get if your site is below position 4!
This shows that it is crucial to ensure that your site is appearing as high as possible in Google search, as it can be the difference between having a successful site or one that has no visitors at all, and if Google traffic is crucial to your business, then it can make or break it.
How Can I Avoid Getting Trapped On Page 2?
The first thing any site wanting to rank on Google should do is high quality keyword research. If you can do this process (or get someone else to do it) proberly and thoroughly, then you will be able to identify the keywords where it would be next to impossible to break on to page 1. Whilst these keywords may be very relevant to your business and have very high volumes, it is usually not worth directly trying to, at least as your main target keywords.
Rather, your keyword research should identify not only these difficult keywords, but also a wide range of lower volume, lower competition keywords, that give you the opportunity to get your site ranking on page 1 for.
Once you have these target keywords, then it is a matter of following the standard SEO practices to get you out of page 2 prison, such as:
- Building your content strategy and creating high quality, topical content
- Building high quality legitimate backlinks into your site
- Optimising the on-page SEO elements of your site
- Ensuring your site is fast, user-friendly, and follows all technical SEO best practices
Are there any reasons to try to get on page 2 of Google?
Actually trying to get on to page 2 is likely to rarely worthwhile. If a search term has enormous search volume but is highly competitive, then it may be possible to drive some decent volumes of traffic. However, with the effort you made to get to page 2 for the high competition keywords, you could have spent the time working on lower competition, lower volume keywords that you have a chance to get on to page 1 for. This will absolutely give you a better chance of driving traffic.
You will, no doubt, end up on page 2 for some keywords, and this is fine. Firstly, not every SEO campaign, will succeed. Secondly, if you are following best practice SEO and creating a large amount of topically relevant, high quality content on your site, then you will naturally appear on Google’s radar for many terms. This spread of keyword ranking can only help with your main ranking for the priority target keywords, which will hopefully be on page 1.
So, in summary, is it worth being on page 2 of Google? Generally in terms of driving traffic, no. However, if you are following a well-crafted SEO and content strategy, then it is likely that you will end up on page 2 for a lot of keywords. Which is fine, as long as you are on page 1 for some of your target keywords!