How to Appear in Position One in 2024 — Whiteboard Friday

However, we’re putting that to one side for today. I just want to talk about not necessarily traditional organic results, but not sponsored results. So what’s actually in position one, excluding ads?

Well, most of the time, about two-thirds of the time, it is actually regular organic, your 10 blue links. This surprised me. I don’t know whether it’s the naysaying. I don’t know whether it’s because adverts are always there, so I don’t sort of notice it. But, yeah, most of the time, you are actually looking at organic in position one. When you’re not looking at organic, you’re looking at a bunch of other features, some of which are in play, some of which are not.

So Knowledge Graph, maybe for a branded term or something, but you can’t really appear in Knowledge Graph, and that is the second biggest result.

Local, of course, you can appear in local, and that’s 7%. So that’s a big chunk of what’s left.

Images, sort of, yes, like it is organic image search, although how much click-through rate you’re going to get is very much open to debate.

Found on the web, this is a new feature that’s kind of come from nowhere in the last year. It’s a bit of a hybrid between featured snippets and Knowledge Graph. So you can click through to a website from this. It is in play.

And then Other, and Other includes a lot of things. Probably the most notable ones are things like videos, which, again, maybe you could have from your brand’s YouTube channel or something like this.

How this tends to work out, sort of another way of saying this same statistic, the two-thirds organic, is that the average rank of the first organic result tends to be about 1.5 on desktop or about 2 on mobile. So that doesn’t sound amazing, like, oh, the average rank that you could get by ranking first is 1.5.

But really that’s not too bad when you consider how many other result types are out there.

So like I said at the start, I think there are some positive news stories here, and there are some less good ones.

You can appear

So the positive one is, as I’ve just said, you can appear. Most of it is organic. A lot of what isn’t organic is stuff that you actually can appear in as a brand.

But not everywhere

What’s not so good is that’s not universally true. So like I said, some of these features, like Knowledge Graph, for example, are not so easy to appear in. And actually, even a lot of organic position one is still not really in play.