CTR for Google Rankings
-
I run a local business, and I'm working on ranking for keyword + city. I currently rank on the first page for just about every keyword I'm working on, but only the top 3 for a little less than half. Because the search volume is so low for each keyword (for most cities Google doesn't have an estimated monthly search volume) the grand total of a few searches a month for each keyword + city combination is where I get my traffic.
Although I seem to be getting consistently higher in the rankings, I am curious as to how much more traffic I can expect. I read somewhere that sites that are ranked number one are clicked 50% of the time, number two 20% of the time, number three 15% and from there on it goes down fast. Rank 7 and on is below 1%. Probably around 30% of my keywords are ranked between 7-10 and probably about 20% are ranked 4-6.
Are the CTR numbers fairly accurate? I understand that there are a lot of influences on CTR, such as title/description, but generally is that somewhat accurate?
If it is, I am missing out on A LOT of traffic.
I am pulling about 800 unique visitors a month from Google. If I get in the top 3 for most of my keywords, can I expect significantly more traffic? I ask the question because there are many other things I could be doing with my time to help the business aside from SEO. I don't want to be working constantly on SEO if traffic is only going to increase very little.
-
Most studies seem to contradict each other at least a little on this but they all give a general idea like this one... not sure how accurate it is, but I found it ages ago at
http://www.seoresearcher.com/distribution-of-clicks-on-googles-serps-and-eye-tracking-analysis.htm
-
If your competitor has exact match and I have exact match + (kickass price or free shipping or top secrets or free beer) then who is going to get the clck?
-
One last thing. I would love to tack on a bit of my USP to the title of the pages such as: "Product + City | USP" but I worry that I would take a hit in rankings because my title is not an exact match with what most people are searching for. Right now there is a close competitor that has pages for "Product + City" in their title, EXACTLY the same way that I do. I think a bit of USP would help CTR soar above the competitor. But if I do that and fall to the second page then it won't help at all.
Do you think this is something I should be worried about?
-
I did a little testing with the state but I was not concerned with state. I figured that local people already assume the state.
What I did find about the state is that the google stats seem to show that people use the Mich abbreviation instead of MI. My assumption is that these people are out of state and not sure if MI is Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi or Missouri. So if I was targeting people outside of the state I would want to use Mich as the abbreviation.
I do know that exact matches typically rank higher than close matches. Therefore I am testing the city+product to see if the ranking increase. In theory I should get better rankings, more traffic and more sales.
-
Thanks for the thoughtful answer! In my case what I have found is opposite a little actually. My service is available throughout my entire county. I am trying to not be spammy in my seo but It's just too difficult right now to make 100% original content for each city I am ranking for. Whereas sites that are ranking above me seem to have less back links and authority but they actually have a physical location and are only offering services in one or two cities.
Is it possible to outrank the smaller websites for their cities if I gain even more trust with the search engines? Right now I just began my linking campaign, and I don't have a whole lot.
-
Thanks for the answer. I am curious about one thing. In your testing did you use the state along with the city name ever? I am convinced that in searches most people do not use the state abbreviation, but I want to show up for those who do. I doubt that using the state in the title/h1's/links etc would make too much of a negative impact, but perhaps it is lowering the weight of the more important keywords ie. product+city as to lower rankings. Do you have any experience with this?
-
One way to get a better number is using Google Webmaster Tools. To test how people search for my product + city I created a few separate sites. Then playing with all the major SEO elements of the pages on the sites. The sites contained a product+city name in the domain. I made sure the site wasn't spammy but contained good product information.
After running the test I found a few things:
1. The google estimated traffic was pretty close to the test numbers (impressions in /webmasters)
2. People were searching for stuff I would have never guessed and finding my pages.
3. People were searching for city+product more than product+cityI am now in the process of creating some pages with city+product in the key elements and see if the placements and numbers increase.
-
When I first started my main site I set my goals on a particular keyword. I just knew that if I got the #1 position I would be swimming in hits (and cash). After a lot of hard work and some successful linkbait I have managed to achieve the #1 position for this keyword. My traffic for this keyword has increased but not dramatically. My conversions are up but only slightly. It was a real disappointment. According to the Adwords Keywords tool I should have had tens of thousands of visitors each month for this keyword. I know now that it just isn't accurate!
I think that every keyword is different. For some keywords, being #1 could change things dramatically. For others it may have only a minor effect.
-
If you move up in the rankings you will almost be guaranteed a higher CTR. So, moving up will bring you a return.
But will that return make a profit?
I believe that it is important to consider who is above you. If you are a tiny local business at #4 with 22 backlinks and the three positions above you are Goliath Brands at #1 and #2 with 1,000,000 backlinks and Major Publisher at #3 with 900,000 backlinks then you might be attacking the US Navy with a slingshot.
In those situations, all is not lost... you still have your title tag that can be used as a lethal weapon. What is your value proposition?....
-- offer a kickass price in the title tag
-- offer immediate free shipping in the title
-- tell them you have the "Secrets to Success"
-- tell them you have "Free Beer"
These will get potential customers onto your website.
If you have something to brag about you should be using the kickass title tag all of the time... but it is especially important if you want to elicit clicks away from the site that ranks above you and that you have little hope of beating.
-
The estimated number of keyword searches is just that, an estimate and is not accurate at all but its all relative.
With that said, this recent blog post has some very useful information on CTR:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110421-092523
So yes, you will end up with a lot more traffic when you move up to the #3 and then #2 and hopefully #1 spot.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Safari and IE killing our mobile ranking
My client's website does fairly well on mobile in a Google Search. So one day, my client is in a staff meeting and everyone does on search on their phones. The client’s website is nowhere on the 1st three pages. I get a call asking why. I tell the client that Google has maybe as high as 90% market share on mobile. Of course, their phones have the factory installed Safari and IE. Client says lots of people don’t change the factory settings on mobile . Question: How do we rate higher on lesser search engines?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
Are we confusing Google with our internal linking?
Hi all, We decided to give importance to one of our top pages as it has "keyword" in it's slug like website.com/keyword. So we internally linked even from different sub-domain pages more than homepage to rank for that "keyword". But this page didn't show up in Google results for that "keyword"; neither homepage, but our login page is ranking. We wonder why login page is ranking. Has our internal linking plan confused Google to ignore homepage to rank for that primary keyword? And generally do we need to internally link homepage more than anyother page? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Any Google Algorithm update?
Did Google release any seo update in last couple of days? My client is seeing 33% low traffic. The site is hyper-local marketplace website in India.
Algorithm Updates | | Avin1230 -
Added the Review rich snippet and rankings have dropped?
Hi Mozzers, I am really surprised what happened here. I conducted a small campaign by adding reviews rich snippet to 10 different microsites(covering different locations). Today I was checking if the snippets were showing up correctly in the SERPs and noticed that most of these locations with review snippet dropped in the rankings? How weird is that? Can anyone explain what happened here? Has anyone experienced this? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Does Site Size Influence Rank?
The Scenario:
Algorithm Updates | | kchandler
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank. The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank? I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks Kyle1 -
How to do SEO for Google places.New trends and tips
How to do SEO for Google places.New trends and tips .Most clients wants their biz in Google places in First page .
Algorithm Updates | | innofidelity0 -
Stop google indexing CDN pages
Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
If you rank first organically for a keyword, will you rank first for variations?
Hi everyone, Hoping that someone will be able to answer this question for us. If we rank first organically for a keyword, are we safe to assume that we'll rank first (or close to it) for variations of that keyword as well? E.g. If we rank first easily for "Hamilton Island", can we safely assume that we will rank well organically for close variations of that keyword such as "Hamilton Islands", "Hamiltonisland", "Hamilton Island Hotel" due to the fact that "Hamilton Island" is in those keywords? We're deciding which keywords to monitor in SEOmoz and we don't want to waste keywords on very similar terms if we don't have to. Really appreciate any responses! Cheers.
Algorithm Updates | | HamiltonIsland0