Clicking on SERPs
-
I've spoken to 2 people in the past few weeks, who have clients who search for their keywords every day, and then click on their own links, but not others, in the belief that this is good for their website ranking.
Google does track clicks with redirects, so I can understand that they would know someone searched for a term, and they clicked on a result.
I could understand if it was once per month, but doing it every day?
And if they keep coming back, to search for other keywords and click on those results too.
Looks like they would just paint a very large target on themselves.
What's your opinion?
-
Seems like this is a great way for the clients to see personalized results with their sites climbing towards the top!
-
Thanks Tom.
Yes, thats what I told them too.
Unfortunately, when someone a client trusts tells them something, it is hard to get them to stop believing it.
-
Traffic has no impact on your SERP visibility. It won't improve it, so doing this will have zero benefit.
In fact, it could even be hurting them (at a stretch). What are they doing once they click through? If they're bouncing off and not spending time on the site, that could actually hurt them. Bounce rate, to some degree, is taken into consideration when Google ranks your site. It would take an awful lot of bounces, but if Google sees people coming to the site and leaving quickly, it's going to start to think "this page does not serve the user".
I wouldn't worry much over clients doing it, but I always believe it's important that clients should understand the basics of SEO, so that they can appreciate your work but also for transparency's sake in the line of business. Educating them over this (and probably personalised search, by the sounds of it) would be a start.
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
-
What would the US traffic increase be for a website YoY if all Google SERP rankings remained the same?
This question has come up a few times with some of our clients and I've spent some time researching this question, but I can't find an answer online so hopefully, someone at MOZ has this data available to them with all the data they collect. The data points that would be needed to answer this question off the top of my head: Increase in the # of Google Searches in the US YoY The decrease in CTR for organic results "10 blue links" which take a searcher off of Google YoY, as Google continues to keep more searchers on Google.com with rich snippets, increased AdWords prominence, AdWords extensions, etc I'm sure this greatly varies per industry, but an average for all industries is all that is needed to answer this client question. Many thanks in advance and I've included a video which hopefully helps to better explain the search "plus/minus" that we can expect to see as SEOs in 2018. WF1yLlJC6LetnpbD3
Search Behavior | | WebpageFX1 -
Different SERPs positions UK - Ireland
Hi there! I've been checking rankings in UK and Ireland for the last months and I found something really interesting... "Belfast + keyword" - UK = 2º position / Ireland = 1º position "keyword + Belfast" - UK = 14º position / Ireland = 1º position *(same keyword) I don't understand how it is possible... Website is not geo-targeted so Google has no preference for any of these countries... Any ideas about why does it happen?
Search Behavior | | seosogood1 -
Do sever errors affect SERPS
hoping someone can help VPS has been causing me 10 days of server errors (im now moving off it) as my wordpress site has kept running out of memory. At the same time my traffic had dropped. Could google and bing be penalising me for number of errors, dropping me in SERPS and resulting in web traffic?
Search Behavior | | mutant20080 -
UK & Ireland Websites displaying same page differently in serps
Hi there, I have a Magento Enterprise store based in the UK and we have an Irish version which we created after finding an increasing amount of traffic from Ireland. One thing that I don't understand, is that if I search for one keyword on Google, the websites are displayed differently, when effectively they are identical websites. Here is how a result looks like for my UK store: http://i.imgur.com/NKSt4Qq.png And here is how a result looks like for my IE store: http://i.imgur.com/Cynv8Mz.png They both have the same Meta description, barring a few geographical words and terms. Both have on page descriptions as well as products. Yet the IE results display the description and the UK results display products and a tiny snippet of the description. Any ideas on how I can make my UK pages display like the IE one? Or, just why they are both displayed differently? Thanks
Search Behavior | | tomhall900 -
Post Panda SERP placement u-turn
Last week we had three terms for a client dive out of the top 100, they all ranked against a particular page, the three terms where where core words for the clients website ... strategic to his business. I assumed that it may have been due to the latest update by Google I assumed it was due to some poor inbound links to the pages (clients re sellers) and a slight abuse of anchor tags. The terms contained one keyword and two variations, a well know software brand. We ranked as high as number two, continually fighting the actual brands main website., but none the less outranking all other re-sellers. This week we are now back ranking higher for the main term (outranking the actual brands website) and the other two are back to where they ranked. Obviously I had organised to sit down with the client tomorrow to discus. Should I bury my head in the sand, rejoice at some fortune and hope the problem is not as bad as I thought, and hope the results stay static going forward ... or is this a chance to rectify those issues I saw with more clarity after the dive bomb of the three phrases last week. Has anyone else noticed anything similar ? Offer any advice ? Cheers John
Search Behavior | | Johnny4B0 -
SERPs changing on an hourly basis
Hi Mozzers, Can anyone help me please. I have a client that is ranking in position 2 for his major keyword in G.co.uk. He's been moving up but over the last 7 - 10 days he's moved down, then back up and around and around the front page which we all know can happen. The thing is - this is changing through the day 4 or 5 times in some cases. I've checked when the first page of the SERPs have been indexed via the cached button and normally Google hasn't crawled the competition or my guys site on the given day the changes happen, yet he's been 2, 5 and 7 and back to 2 in about 3 hours. Are these social signals do you think? whats going on - any ideas? Cheers Bush
Search Behavior | | Bush_JSM0 -
Why are my SERPs fluctuating 60+/- on a weekly basis?
I have a blog that's gone from not indexed, to indexed and ranked around 85 on 3 target key phrases. With a bit of SEO the blog jumped to around 11th on those 3 key phases in a week or so. Now, the following week, it has bombed back to 76th. Why the dramatic fluctuations?
Search Behavior | | ksracer0 -
Ranking multiple domains in the SERPS for same keywords?
Curious if anyone has had success ranking multiple sites with same whois and server info? We have a client who has purchased multiple businesses over the years in the same industry. Each site has a solid amount of link popularity already and good respected Brand. But I'm wondering with the whois info being the same and the same servers, if ranking for multiple domains will be worth attempting.
Search Behavior | | iAnalyst.com0