The power of search engine ranking for tourist destinations

• The clickthrough rates on search engine result page follow power law distribution.
• Image search and mobile search follow different clickthrough curves.
• High ranks in web search is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
• Image and mobile searches provide different opportunities for tourist destinations.
• Competing on niche keywords is the key to successful search engine marketing.

Most online travelers in the United States use search engines to seek out travel information. Thus, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) need to attract clicks through returned results on search engines. We modeled clickthrough rates (CTRs) of several published clickthrough reports and investigate the CTRs of a DMO's webpages on different ranks of different properties (web, image, and mobile searches) on a search engine. The results validated the power-law distribution of CTRs on different ranks: the top results attract high CTRs but the rates decrease precipitously when the ranks go down. However, top ranks are a necessary condition but not a sufficient one: many top ranked results have low CTRs. Image search and mobile search have different CTR curves, providing different opportunities for tourism destinations and businesses.