You can do the same. We’re going to take a look at nine types of meta descriptions that can help you get more clicks.

For each, I’ll walk you through an example, showing you what’s working well with that meta description tag and what it could potentially be doing better.

You don’t have to pick just one of these methods to use. You might want to focus on a particular angle, like writing a meta description tag that’s “call-to-action” focused but add in something else too like power words or a USP.

Here are nine different ways you can approach meta description tags:

1. Clarity focused

Meta description tags should be clear, letting the searcher know what they’re going to get. After all, if you confuse people, they’re not going to click through.

What works well 

This description takes a “what it says on the tin” approach in describing the website. It’s very clear about who the target audience is – “nerds and average Joes” rather than, for instance, hardcore bodybuilders. It also clearly and succinctly explains the benefits the site can provide for the searcher with the description line, “lose weight, get stronger, live better”.

Room for improvement

The title tag and meta description are repetitive. The second part of the title tag (after the colon) is the same as the second sentence in the meta description. It would read better if these were both different, this would also provide room to give more information or benefits.

The title tag also appears to be targeting generic keywords like “lose weight”, so it might be better to focus on more specific keywords here.

2. USP focused

A “USP” is a company’s “unique selling point”. It’s something that distinguishes their product from all the other similar products out there. The USP could be based on added value, quality, service, speed, advanced features, or almost anything else that acts as a differentiator.

Leading with a USP can work particularly work well for site homepages, where the meta description might otherwise seem rather generic.

What works well

Zappos is well known for its outstanding customer support and in the United States, it’s often considered the gold standard for online businesses. Here, Zappos communicates this through several strong USPs like “free shipping and returns”, “1000s of styles”, “365-day return policy”, and “24/7 customer service”.

The word “legendary” helps emphasize how Zappos is famed for its customer service and makes them sound a bit more epic. (See point six for more on using power words in your meta description tag.)

Room for improvement

This is a little picky, but all caps plus an exclamation point for “GET FREE SHIPPING & RETURNS!” comes across as a little shouty. It makes it seem like Zappos is trying a bit too hard, and doesn’t really convey quite the right feel for a large, professional company.

3. Question focused

People tend to turn to search engines because they’ve got a question so why not ask them one to help show that you know what they’re looking for?

This is my go-to type of meta description when I’m struggling with ideas and it works in almost all contexts.

What works well

If someone’s searching for SEO tips, asking if they’re interested in learning more about SEO will almost certainly get a positive response – they’re hardly going to say “nope”! The inclusion of “in 2019” helps suggest that the advice provided will be up-to-date, and “key trends” also ties in with this, indicating that this article will focus on tips that follow the latest thinking in the SEO industry.

Room for improvement

This is very picky, but the URL and the date stamp that appear immediately before this meta description tag both include “2018”. It’s obvious if you think about why this is the case. This post was published at the end of 2018, looking toward trends in 2019 but it could create a brief moment of confusion for a searcher who’s scanning through results quickly.

4. Purpose-focused

In some cases, it might be appropriate to emphasize a greater purpose behind your website, whether that’s a particular corporate value or a very practical way in which you make a difference. This can provide searchers with an additional incentive to check out your site rather than the others.

What works well

TOMS’ purpose is very clear from this short, easy-to-read description. They’re not driven by profit, but instead by helping others. Even if the searcher hasn’t heard of them and their “One for One” policy, it’s clear what it means from the context and the ® icon helps indicate that it’s a recognized and registered policy.

Room for improvement

It isn’t actually clear what TOMS sells. They started as a company selling shoes and matching each pair sold with a new pair given to a child in need. They now sell shoes and sunglasses, but you wouldn’t know that from the meta description tag above.

Note: Since the initial research for this post, TOMS has indeed updated their title tag to include shoes and sunglasses, but their meta description tag still uses the rather generic word “product”.

5. Call-to-action focused

Providing a call-to-action in your meta description tag might sound unusual, but for many products, it makes great sense. A clear call-to-action can prompt searchers not only to click but to also do something once they arrive on your site.

What works well

The call to action is both clear and repeated with statements like “Download the full version” and “Start your free trial today”. Having it at both the start and end of the meta description emphasizes it, especially with the word “free” being used in both places.

Room for improvement

The second sentence of the meta description tag is fairly generic, “photos, images, 3D artwork and more”. Given that Adobe is a huge brand, it might be worth it for them to try a little harder here to add more appeal to creative types, perhaps by using some stronger power words. (See point seven.)

6. Offer focused

This type of description combines a question or a point of curiosity with specific offers to entice readers to click through.

What works well

Starting with a question, as we’ve seen already, can help get an easy “yes”. The offers here sound impressively good, a four-star London hotel for £21 definitely sounds attractive. Including details of “The Savoy” makes it clear that KAYAK isn’t just for bargain hunters, though, and includes prestigious hotels too.

Room for improvement

I’m a bit of a stickler for making sure meta descriptions are within the limits and not truncated with the “…” at the end, but some SEOs feel this approach entices the user to click through. You might want to try using an SEO tool that helps check the meta content preview for length and strength, and see how it works for you.

It’s a small detail, but it seems a little odd that KAYAK has “3 stars from £33” and “4 stars+ from £21” – which is significantly cheaper. Obviously, there are lots of reasons this could be the case (e.g. location, special details) but it might cause a brief moment of confusion or even skepticism for the reader.

7. Power words focused

Focusing on power words like “incredible”, “powerful”, “secret”, “little-known”, and so on can help make your meta description tag stand out. Smart Blogger has an enormous list of power words here if you need some more suggestions. Be careful to not overdo it, though. If you stuff your keyword description with power words, it’ll look over-hyped.

What works well

The words “free” and “expert” both work well to grab attention. “Free” is always a good promise and “expert” implies that this advice will be well worth following and ensures that it will go beyond the basics. In the final sentence, “complete” is also a good power word as it suggests the searcher won’t need to turn to any other resource if they use this one.

Room for improvement

The sentence “Get your complete online career advice service” reads rather oddly. It reads more like it’s been optimized for search engines rather than for the people reading it. I’d suggest something like “We’re your complete online career advice service” or “Use our complete online career advice service” (and even those might sound a little over-optimized).

8. Special characters focused

Including symbols and emojis in your meta description tag can help it visually stand out in a sea of words. Depending on your brand, it could tie in well with your values. For example, if you want to come across as playful, or if you’re a brand aimed at teens you could focus on conveying the “fun” element.

Keep in mind that some searchers may react negatively to symbols and emojis, considering them unprofessional or even spammy.

What works well

The green boxes with check marks catch the searcher’s eye, drawing them to the listing. They help to highlight key points in the listing with “the best deals”, “the lowest prices”, and “great savings”.

Room for improvement

This meta description tag is written in a rather generic way probably because eBay has automatically created it according to a set of rules. The exact same description could be used for many other pages with just the words “Temporary Tattoos” changed, so it lacks relevance.

9. Solution-focused

One final approach to meta description tags is to focus on the solution or win that you’re providing for searchers. This type of meta description will promise something that the searcher will achieve through buying from the website or in some cases, simply from reading the content on a site.

What works well

This meta description tag starts with a question that searchers are very likely to say “yes” to. The question “Want to learn how to snowboard in a day?” offers a clear outcome for the reader and also brings in a USP with “the quickest training method” implying that it’s quicker than other similar companies.

Room for improvement

“Recreational standard” lacks clarity, and sounds rather like in-house lingo. Total beginners may not know what this really means, so it would be better to use language that their target audience will understand.

Meta descriptions can make or break how much SEO traffic you get. A great meta description tag will allow any page (including your homepage) to punch above its weight on Google, getting you more clicks through an increased-click through rate, potentially even a higher ranking.

Joe Williams is founder of Tribe SEO. He can be found on Twitter at @joetheseo.

The post Nine types of meta descriptions that win more clicks appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

To every person involved, the perception of SEO and its success can vary from a sophisticated technical grasp to a knowledge of the essentials.

At all levels, measurement and understanding of search data are crucial and different metrics will stand out; from rankings to the finer details of goals and page speed.

As you may know, you can’t rely solely on ranks as a method to track your progress. But there are other, simple ways to measure the impact of SEO on a business.

In a recent AMA on Reddit, Google’s own Gary Illyes recently urged SEO professionals to stick to the basics and this way of thinking can be applied to the measurement of organic search performance.

In this article, we will look to understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to understanding the impact of SEO, and how they can be viewed from a technical and commercial perspective. Before we start, it’s worth mentioning that this article has used Google’s own demo analytics account for screenshots. If you need further info to get to grips, check out this article, or access the demo version of Google Analytics.

Each of these are commercial SEO metrics — data that means something to everyone in a business.

Organic traffic

This is undoubtedly a simple, if not the most simple way of understanding the return of any SEO efforts. The day-to-day traffic from search engines is the key measure for many marketers and any increase can often be tied to an improved level of search visibility (excluding seasonal variation).

In a world where data drives decisions, these figures are pretty important and represent a key part of any internet user’s session, whether that is to get an answer, make a purchase or something else.

In Google Analytics, simply head follow this path: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels to see the organic traffic received within your chosen time period

You might be asking, “how can I know more?”

Google might have restricted access to keyword data back in 2011, but you can still dig down into your traffic from organic search to look at landing pages and locations.

Organic traffic data – Filtered by landing page 

Not all traffic from search hits your homepage, some users head to your blog or to specific landing pages, depending on their needs. For some searches, however, like those for your company name, your homepage will be the most likely option.

To understand the split of traffic across your site, use the “Landing Page” primary dimension and explore the new data, split by specific page URL.

Organic traffic data – Filtered by location

Within the same section, the organic search data can be split by location, such as city, to give even further detail on the makeup of your search traffic. Depending on how your business operates, the locations shown may be within the same country or across international locations. If you have spent time optimizing for audiences in specific areas, this view will be key to monitor overall performance.

Revenue, conversions, and goals

In most cases, your website is likely to be set up to draw conversions, whether that is product sales, document downloads, or leads.

Part of understanding the success of SEO, is the contribution to the goal of a business, whether that is monetary or lead-based.

For revenue based data, head to the conversions section within Google analytics, then select the product performance. Within that section, filter the secondary dimension by source/medium to show just sales that originate from search engine traffic.

If your aim isn’t totally revenue based, perhaps a signup form or some downloadable content, then custom analytics goals are your way of fully understanding the actions of visitors that originate from search engines.

Within the conversions section, the source of your goal completions can be split by source, allowing you to focus on solely visits from organic search.

If a visitor finds your site from a search and then buys something or registers their details, it really suggests you are visible to the right audience.

However, if you are getting consistent organic search visits with no further actions taken, that suggests the key terms you rank for, aren’t totally relevant to your website.

SEO efforts should focus on reaching the relevant audiences, you might rank #1 for a search query like “cat food” but if you only sell dog products, your optimization hasn’t quite worked.

Search and local visibility

In the case that your business has web and/or physical store presences, you can use the tools within Google My Business to look further into and beyond the performance of the traditional blue links.
Specifically, you can understand the following:

• How customers search for your business
• How someone sees your business
• What specific actions they take

The better your optimization, the more of these actions you will see, check these out!

Average search rankings

Rankings for your key terms on search engines have traditionally been an easy way to quickly get a view of overall performance. However, a “quick Google” can be hard to draw conclusions from. Personalized search from your history and location essentially skews average rank to a point where its use has been diminished.

A variety of tools can be used to get a handle on average rankings for specific terms. The free way to do this is through Google Search Console with freemium tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs, which also offer an ability to understand average rank distribution.

With search rankings becoming harder to accurately track, the measure of averages is the best way to understand how search ranking relates to and impacts the wider business.

Technical metrics – Important but not everyone pays attention to these

When it comes to the more technical side of measuring SEO, you have to peel back the layers and look beyond clicks and traffic. They help complete the wider picture of SEO performance, plus they can help uncover additional opportunities for progress.

Search index – Through search consoles and other tools

Ensuring that an accurate index of your website exists is one thing that you need to do with SEO. Because if only a part of your site or the wrong pages are indexed, then your overall performance will suffer.

Although a small part of overall SEO work, its arguably one of the most crucial.

One quick way is to enter the command “site:” followed by the URL of your site’s homepage, to see the total number of pages that exist in a search engine’s index.

To inspect the status of a specific page on Google, the Google Search Console is your best option. The newest version of the search console provides a quick way to bring up results.

Search crawl errors

As well as looking at what has been indexed, any website owner needs to keep an eye out for what may be missing, or if there have been any crawl errors reported by Google. These often occur because a page has been blocked, or the format isn’t crawlable by Google.

Head to the “Coverage” tab within Google Search Console to understand the nature of any errors and what page the error relates to. If there’s a big zero, then you and your business naturally have nothing to worry about.

Click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate

In addition to where and how your website ranks for searches, a metric to consider is how often your site listing is clicked in the SERPs. Essentially, this shows the percentage of impressions that result in a site visit.

This percentage indicates how relevant your listing is to the original query and how well your result ranks compared to your competitors.

If people like what they see and can easily find your website, then you’ll likely get a new site visit.

The Google Search Console is the best go-to resource again for the most accurate data. Just select the performance tab and toggle the CTR tab to browse data by query, landing page, country of origin, and device.

If someone does venture onto your site, you will want to ensure the page they see, is relevant to their search, after all, search algorithms love to reward relevance! If the page doesn’t contain the information required or isn’t user-friendly, then it is likely the user will leave to find a better resource, without taking any action, known as a bounce.

In some cases, one visit may be all that is needed, therefore a bounce isn’t an issue. Make sure to view this metric in the wider context of what your business offers.

Mobile friendliness

Widely reported in 2015, was the unveiling of mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. This is crucial to the evolution of browser behavior, with mobile traffic, often greater in volume than desktop for some sites.

Another report in the ever useful Google Search Console gives a clear low-down of how mobile-friendly a site is, showing warnings for any issues. It’s worth saying, this measure isn’t an indication of how likely a conversion is, but more the quality of your site on a mobile device.

Follow your metrics and listen to the data

As mentioned at the start of this article, data drives decisions. In all areas of business, certain numbers will stand out. With SEO, a full understanding comes from multiple data points, with positives and negatives to be taken at every point of the journey.

Ultimately, it often comes down to traffic, ranks, and conversions, the numbers that definitely drive business are made up of the metrics that don’t often see the light of day but are just as important.

As a digital marketer, it is always a learning experience to know how data drives the evolution of a business and ultimately, how successes and opportunities are reported and understood.

Matthew Ramsay is Digital Marketing Manager at Digitaloft. 

Further reading:

• How to take advantage of the latest updates to Google Search Console
• Complete guide to Google Search Console
• Progressive web apps (PWAs) for SEO: Benefits, stats, examples
• How to perfectly balance affiliate marketing and SEO

The post The SEO metrics that really matter for your business appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

In SEO, there has long been a notion that Google uses a metric called Time-To-Long-Click (TTLC), first noted in 2013 by AJ Kohn in this wonderful article.

Since then, Google has released several research papers that elaborate on the complexity of measuring search quality due to their evolving nature.

Most notably:

• Direct Answers
• Positional bias
• Expanding ad results
• SERP features
• SERP layout variations

All of these factors can have varying effects on how users interact and click (or don’t click) on Google results for a query.  Google no doubt has various click models that set out expectations for how users should click based on search type and position.

This can be helpful in understanding outlier results either above or below the curve to help Google do a better job with satisfaction for all searches.

Search satisfaction

The reason this is important is that it can help us reframe our understanding of search result clicks away from CTR and TTLC and towards an understanding of search satisfaction.

Our web pages are just a potential part of the entire experience for users. Google released a publication in 2016 called Incorporating Clicks, Attention and Satisfaction into a Search Engine Result Page Evaluation Model.

This paper, along with accompanying code, attempts to use clicks, user attention, and satisfaction to distinguish how well the results performed for the user and to predict user action (which is a required feature in any click model).

The paper goes on to elaborate that the type of searches this model is useful for is long-tail informational searches, because “while a small number of head queries represent a big part of a search engine’s traffic, all modern search engines can answer these queries quite well.” (Citation)

Generally, the model looks at:

• Attention: A model that looks at rank, serp item type, and the element’s location on the page in conjunction with click, mouse movement and satisfaction labels.
• Clicks: A click probability model which takes into account SERP position and the knowledge that a result must have been seen to have been clicked.
• Satisfaction: A model that uses search quality ratings along with user interaction with the various search elements to define the overall utility to the user of the page.

Are clicks really needed?

The most interesting aspect of  this research is the concept that a search result does not actually need to receive a click to be useful.

Users may receive their answer from the search results and not require clicking through to a result, although the paper mentioned that, “while looking at the reasons specified by the raters we found out that 42% of the raters who said that they would click through on a SERP, indicated that their goal was ‘to confirm information already present in the summary.’” (Citation)

Another interesting (and obvious) takeaway across multiple research papers, is the importance of quality raters’ data in the training of models to predict search satisfaction.

None of this should be taken to assume that there is a direct impact on how clicks, attention, or other user-generated metrics affect search results. There have been a number of SEO tests with mixed results that tried to prove click impact on ranking.

At most there seems to be a temporary lift, if any at all. What this would suggest is that, being an evaluation metric, this type of model could be used in the training of internal systems which predict the ideal position of search results.

Click models

Aleksandr Chuklin, a Software Engineer at Google Research Europe and expert in Information Retrieval, published a paper and accompanying website in 2015 that evaluates various click models for web search.

The paper is interesting because it looks at the various models and underlines their various strengths and weaknesses. A few things of interest:

Models can:

• Look at all results as equal.
• Look at only results that would have been reviewed (top to bottom).
• Look at multi-click single session instances.
• Look at “perseverance” after a click (TTLC).
• Look at the distance between current click and the last clicked document to predict user SERP browsing.

In addition, this gives some intuition into the fact that click models can be very helpful to Google beyond search satisfaction, by helping them understand the type of search.

Navigational queries are the most common queries in Google and click models can be used to determine navigational as opposed to informational and transactional queries. The click-through rate for these queries is more predictable than the latter two.

Wrapping up

Understanding click models and how Google uses them to evaluate the quality of search results can help us, as SEOs, understand variations in CTR when reviewing Google Search Console and Search Analytics data.

We often see that brand terms have a CTR of sixty to seventy percent (navigational), and that some results (that we may be ranking well for) have lower than expected clicks. Paul Shapiro looked into this in 2017 in a post that provided a metric (Modified z-score) for outliers in CTR as reported in Google Search Console.

Along with tools like this, it is important to understand more globally that Google has come a long way since ten blue links, and that many things have an impact on clicks, rather than just a compelling title tag.

Having established the importance of search satisfaction to Google, is there anything that SEOs can do to optimize for it?

• Be aware that investigating whether CTR directly affects search is probably a rabbit hole: even if it did, the impact would more than likely be on longer tail non-transactional searches.
• Google wants to give their users a great experience. Your listing is just a part of that – so make sure you add to the experience.
• Make sure you understand the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. How your site is designed, written, and developed can strongly affect how Google judges your expertise, authority, and trust.

JR Oakes is the Director of Technical SEO at Adapt Partners.

The post Understanding click-through rate (CTR) in the context of search satisfaction appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

What we are still getting our collective heads around is what this change means for us as marketers.

Consumers have different expectations of the information they want when they search for “running shoes” at 9am from their desktop at work, versus “running shoes” at 6pm on their iPhone two miles away from a store. We as marketers needs to consider these expectations and deliver uniquely for them.

I wanted to take a look at some of the data across various AdWords accounts and understand how search campaigns are performing by desktop and mobile and different distances from the physical store location the search is coming from.

The insights align with what you might expect, but probably don’t align with how you are managing your campaigns – yet.

How distance impacts CTR, CPC and click percentage in local search advertising

Let’s first start with click-through rate (CTR) by distance. This metric might be the biggest variance and potentially most obvious when you stop and think about it. It stands to reason that CTR would be higher the closer a consumer is to the physical location.

However, what I didn’t expect was how much higher and how much larger the variance is for mobile compared with desktop. Our data shows that within one mile of a store, mobile CTRs are 2.5 times higher than desktop CTRs. The implications of this are logical, but really indicate a desire to go in-store. Once you get outside the first mile, the CTRs drop to be just one percentage point higher than desktop.

Next, let’s take a look at cost per click (CPC) by device.

Here we see a very interesting trend that aligns with the concept behind quality score. We see that CPCs are their lowest for mobile within one mile of a store. After understanding that the CTRs were 2.5 times higher on mobile versus desktop, one can assume that the relevancy rate is helping to earn these lower CPCs.

The trend here is the opposite based on device. CPCs are going up for mobile each distance further from the location vs. desktop which is seeing a steady decrease the further away. I think the desktop reduction speaks to the geo-targeting that occurs and reduces competition since fewer brands would enter the auction.

Lastly, I thought that the trends surrounding percentage of clicks by device and distance were very interesting.

Although cumulative, the amount of traffic that Google is able to gather less than one mile from a physical location is still much smaller than the traffic more than 15 miles away. So it make sense that there is still a larger percentage for mobile devices versus desktop at a close range, given the relevancy factor for those consumers as well as the advertisers themselves.

Relevancy: The name of the game

Ultimately, that is what I think this game is all about – relevancy. Here are three tips that you can take away from these findings, and use to create more relevant marketing for your consumers.

Relevant experiences

We know as consumers ourselves that we expect relevant experiences. We expect the opening hours of the store to be correct, we expect landing pages on mobile to be mobile responsive, and so on.

As advertisers, given the tools that we have available including customer match (now available with phone number and address as well), and various extensions, we have a lot more opportunities to increase relevancy for consumers.

This data just validates those relevancy expectations. Now it is on us as marketers to ensure we take advantage of these tools to give customers what they want, when they want it, and how they want it.

Understand your customers’ interactions with your business

What does this data look like for your business? What are the specific insights for you? Should you be bidding higher for consumers closer to your location?

Should your landing page focus on calls to action bringing consumers in-store, if that search is during store hours and they are less than one mile from your location? What is your specific data saying?

What CRM data can be used to augment this data?

The more you know about your customer base, the more you can use that information to create a better experience and a more loyal customer. How are you using your CRM data to understand where specific consumers interact, target them or cross-sell?

There are so many pieces of data that can be cut up to give an advantage to your search program. What needs to be a focus for many is to better understand how that data relates to your customers’ expectations and not yours.

For example, many paid search managers want a conversion to occur online, so the measurement and ROI story can be as strong as possible. However, the downside to that is it serves your own interests and potentially not the customer’s.

I think this data is a great indicator of how to tie consumer behavior to experience, and I firmly believe that the more we can do this as an industry, the better off we’ll be.

The post How creating relevant experiences can boost your clicks on local search ads appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

This white label with green text and a green outline will replace the green label that was launched in June 2016.

The instant reaction to this is that the new labels fit in quite seamlessly with the rest of the paid placement, perhaps creating less of a contrast between them and their organic counterparts.

So why has Google made the change now, what impact will it have have, and will users even notice the change?

The official line on this update is that Google wants to streamline the number of colors on its results pages, particularly on mobile devices. A Google spokesperson revealed:

“After experimenting with a new search ad label with a green outline, we’ve decided to roll it out. The new ad label is more legible and continues to make our results page easier to read for our users with clear indication of our ad labeling.”

Additionally, they claimed that “the color change had no bearing on consumers’ ability to distinguish ads from organic listings on the page.”

So why make the change at all?

First of all, these changes never occur in a vacuum. This is just an indication of a wider trend and should be viewed in the context of the removal of right-hand side ads, expanded text ads, and the consistent drive towards a ‘mobile-first’ approach.

Add in the growth of ad blockers, intensifying competition in the search industry (with both Facebook and Pinterest upping their efforts), and the constant pressure on Google to grow its revenues, and the reasons for moving to a less noticeable ‘Ad’ label become apparent.

We should also beware the source of this information. Google may say it has had no impact in testing, but that seems a convenient line for a company that is close to obsessive in its desire to attract more paid clicks through attention to the minutiae.

Google is famed – sometimes ridiculed – for this constant tinkering, but it does work.

Their highly-publicized ‘50 shades of blue’ experiment was seen by some as a step too far, but Marissa Meyer made sure to state that it drove an extra $200m in ad revenue. Even at a company of Google’s size, those figures talk.

It is also worth remembering where we have come from with these ‘Ad’ labels. People can have short memories – a fact that such frequent adjustments take advantage of – and this latest change makes sense when viewed at a higher level.

Google’s ‘Ad’ labels have gone from garishly overbearing to their latest camouflage iteration in the course of just two years:

The change from yellow to green in mid-2016 was reported to have a positive impact for paid search CTR, and few will doubt that last week’s move was led by exactly the same motive.

But is this just a myopic attempt to gain clicks (and the accompanying revenue) in the short term? Or is there more at play here?

For many in the organic search industry, this will just be another step in the inexorable march towards paid search domination of results pages.

One assumption at the heart of Google’s latest update is that users simply want to get to the result that answers their query, whether a brand has paid for their click or not. Giving more space to paid placements and a never-ending stream of new products to make these ads more attractive undoubtedly gives prominence to sponsored listings.

But, the counter-argument goes, people prefer organic listings. They know an ad when they see it and will go out of their way to avoid it.

Perhaps.

However, one of the reasons this has held sway in the past is that paid search landing pages have at times been of lower quality or of lesser relevance to the query than organic listings. Brands are willing to pay their way to the top, while that right has to be earned in SEO. The quality of the search results in each camp reflected this.

Which brings us to the growing impact of content marketing and user experience signals in SEO. These factors are essential for any successful SEO strategy and they touch all aspects of a brand’s digital footprint – including paid search.

All that effort site owners have put into creating ‘great content’ to improve their SEO rankings plays directly into the hands of AdWords. If Google can convince brands that the best way to get this new content in front of people is to pay for that right, they will do so. The same great content ends up in front of consumers, so everyone wins. Brands still get the traffic (at a higher price), users get the result they want, and Google makes more money.

Someone has to lose, though, and SEO traffic seems most likely to assume this position.

A diminished SEO landscape would be to the detriment of user experience, though, and no monopoly (even one as seemingly immovable as Google) has a divine right to market ownership. Higher CTR for paid listings will have to go hand-in-hand with a better user experience if this pitfall is to be avoided. If the quality of results starts to dip, alternative search engines do exist.

Another argument is that perhaps the role of paid search is starting to change. The AdWords business model is beautifully crafted for a direct response strategy, but it has its limits when it comes to brand marketing. As brand budgets start to move into the digital space, it would make sense to have a less obvious ‘Ad’ label if Google wants to encourage advertisers to spend this budget on AdWords.

As always, there is much room for speculation, even if the central thrust behind this move seems to be an intended increase in paid search revenues.

One thing is for sure, though: we will be keeping a very close eye on CTR for both paid and organic listings over the upcoming days and weeks to see how this plays out.

The post How will Google’s new ‘Ad’ label impact marketers? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Why is there such a debate? Well, often people get hung up on details and semantics (are we talking about a direct or indirect ranking factor?), Google patents (which may or may not even be in use), and competing theories (everyone’s got an opinion based off something they heard or read). To make matters more confusing, Google is less than forthcoming about the secrets of their algorithm.

But if CTR truly does impact Google’s organic search rankings, shouldn’t we be able to measure it? Yes!

In this post, I’ll share some intriguing data on the relationship between Google CTR and rankings. I’ll also share four tips for making sure your Google click-through rates on the organic SERPs are where they need to be.

To be clear: my goal with this post is to provide just a brief background and some actionable insights about the topic of organic click-through rates on Google. We won’t dissect every tweet or quote ever made by anyone at Google, dive deep into patents, or refute all the SEO theories about whether CTR is or isn’t a ranking factor. I’m sharing my own theory based on what I’ve seen, and my recommendations on how to act on it.

Google CTR & rankings: Yes! No! Who bloody knows!

Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting recently published a post with a headline stating that CTR isn’t a ranking factor. He clarifies within that post that Google doesn’t use CTR as a direct ranking factor.

What’s the difference between a direct and indirect ranking factor? Well, I suggest you watch Rand Fishkin’s awesome video on this very topic.

Basically, we know certain things directly impact rankings (I got a link from a reputable website, hooray!), but there are many other things that don’t have a direct impact, but nevertheless do impact ranking (some big-time influencer tweeted about my company and now tons of people are searching for us and checking out our site, awesome!).

It’s essentially the same issue as last touch attribution, which assigns all the credit to the last interaction. But in reality, multiple channels (PPC, organic, social, email, affiliates, etc.) can play important roles in the path to conversion.

The same is true with ranking. Many factors influence ranking.

So here’s my response: Direct, indirect, who cares? CTR might not be a “direct core ranking signal,” but if it impacts rank (and I believe it does), then it matters. Further, even if it doesn’t impact rank, you should still care!

But don’t take my word for it that Google has the technology. Check out these slides from Google engineer Paul Haahr, who spoke at SMX:

Also, AJ Kohn put together a good post about Google click-through rate as a ranking signal last year. He included a couple eye-opening quotes that I’ll share here because they are important. The first from Edmond Lau, a former Google engineer:

“It’s pretty clear that any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking to improve the quality of search results. Infrequently clicked results should drop toward the bottom because they’re less relevant, and frequently clicked results bubble toward the top. Building a feedback loop is a fairly obvious step forward in quality for both search and recommendations systems, and a smart search engine would incorporate the data.”

The second from Marissa Mayer in 2007 talking about how Google used CTR as a way to determine when to display a OneBox:

“We hold them to a very high click-through rate expectation and if they don’t meet that click-through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click-through rates per OneBox presentation per query. So it might be that news is performing really well on Bush today but it’s not performing very well on another term, it ultimately gets turned off due to lack of click-through rates. We are authorizing it in a way that’s scalable and does a pretty good job enforcing relevance.”

Also, check out this amazing excerpt from an FTC document that was obtained by the WSJ:

“In addition, click data (the website links on which a user actually clicks) is important for evaluating the quality of the search results page. As Google’s former chief of search quality Udi Manber testified:

‘The ranking itself is affected by the click data. If we discover that, for a particular query, hypothetically, 80 percent of people click on Result No. 2 and only 10 percent click on Result No. 1, after a while we figure out, well, probably Result 2 is the one people want. So we’ll switch it.’

Testimony from Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt confirms that click data is important for many purposes, including, most importantly, providing ‘feedback’ on whether Google’s search algorithms are offering its users high quality results.”

Why organic Google CTR matters

If you have great positions in the SERPs, that’s awesome. But even high rankings don’t guarantee visits to your site.

What really matters is how many people are clicking on your listing (and not bouncing back immediately). You want to attract more visitors who are likely to stick around and then convert.

In 2009, the head of Google’s webspam team at the time, Matt Cutts, was asked about the importance of maximizing your organic CTR. Here’s a key quote that says it all:

“It doesn’t really matter how often you show up. It matters how often you get clicked on and then how often you … convert those to whatever you really want (sales, purchases, subscriptions)… Do spend some time looking at your title, your URL, and your snippet that Google generates, and see if you can find ways to improve that and make it better for users because then they’re more likely to click. You’ll get more visitors, you’ll get better return on your investment.”

In another video, he talked about the importance of titles, especially on your important web pages: “you want to make something that people will actually click on when they see it in the search results – something that lets them know you’re gonna have the answer they’re looking for.”

Bottom line: Google cares a lot about overall user engagement with the results they show in the SERPs. So if Google is testing your page for relevancy to a particular keyword search, and you want that test to go your way, you better have a great CTR (and great content and great task completion rates). Otherwise, you’ll fail the quality test and someone else will get chosen.

Testing the real impact of organic CTR on Google

Rand Fishkin conducted one of the most popular tests of the influence of CTR on Google’s search results. He asked people to do a specific search and click on the link to his blog (which was in 7th position). This impacted the rankings for a short period of time, moving the post up to 1st position.

But these are all temporary changes. The rankings don’t persist because the inflated CTR’s aren’t natural.

It’s like how you can’t increase your AdWords Quality Scores simply by clicking on your own ads a few times. This is the oldest trick in the book and it doesn’t work. (Sorry.)

Isn’t CTR too easy to game?

The results of another experiment appeared on Search Engine Land last August and concluded that CTR isn’t a ranking factor. But this test had a pretty significant flaw ­– it relied on bots artificially inflating CTRs and search volume (and this test was only for a single two-word keyword: “negative SEO”). So essentially, this test was the organic search equivalent of click fraud.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying Google will never use CTR in organic rankings because “it’s too easy to game” or “too easy to fake.” I disagree. Google AdWords has been fighting click fraud for 15 years and they can easily apply these learnings to organic search. There are plenty of ways to detect unnatural clicking. What did I just say about old tricks?

Before we look at the data, a final “disclaimer.” I don’t know if what this data reveals is due to RankBrain, or another machine-learning-based ranking signal that’s already part of the core Google algorithm. Regardless, there’s something here – and I can most certainly say with confidence that CTR is impacting rank.

NEW DATA: Does organic CTR impact SEO rankings?

Google has said that RankBrain is being tested on long-tail terms, which makes sense. Google wants to start testing its machine-learning system with searches they have little to no data on – and 99% of pages have zero external links pointing to them.

How is Google able to tell which pages should rank in these cases?

By examining engagement and relevance. CTR is one of the best indicators of both.

High-volume head terms, as far as we know, aren’t being exposed to RankBrain right now. So by observing the differences between the organic search CTRs of long-tail terms versus head terms, we should be able to spot the difference:

So here’s what we did: We looked at 1,000 keywords in the same keyword niche (to isolate external factors like Google shopping and other SERP features that can alter CTR characteristics). The keywords are all from my own website: wordstream.com.

I compared CTR versus rank for one- or two-word search terms, and did the same thing for long-tail keywords (search terms between 4 to 10 words).

Notice how the long-tail terms get much higher average CTRs for a given position. For example, in this data set, the head term in position 1 got an average CTR of 17.5%, whereas the long-tail term in position 1 had a remarkably high CTR, at an average of 33%.

You’re probably thinking: “Well, that makes sense. You’d expect long-tail terms to have stronger query intent, thus higher CTRs.” That’s true, actually.

But why is that long-tail keyword terms with high CTRs are so much more likely to be in top positions versus bottom-of-page organic positions? That’s a little weird, right?

OK, let’s do an analysis of paid search queries in the same niche. We use organic search to come up with paid search keyword ideas and vice versa, so we’re looking at the same keywords in many cases.

Long-tail terms in this same vertical get higher CTRs than head terms. However, the difference between long-tail and head term CTR is very small in positions 1–2, and becomes huge as you go out to lower positions.

So in summary, something unusual is happening:

• In paid search, long-tail and head terms do roughly the same CTR in high ad spots (1–2) and see huge differences in CTR for lower spots (3–7).
• But in organic search, the long-tail and head terms in spots 1–2 have huge differences in CTR and very little difference as you go down the page.

Why are the same keywords behaving so differently in organic versus paid?

The difference (we think) is that pages with higher organic click-through rates are getting a search ranking boost.

How to beat the expected organic search CTR

CTR and ranking are codependent variables. There’s obviously a relationship between the two, but which is causing what? In order to get to the bottom of this “chicken versus egg” situation, we’re going to have to do a bit more analysis.

The following graph takes the difference between an observed organic search CTR minus the expected CTR, to figure out if your page is beating — or being beaten by — the expected average CTR for a given organic position.

By only looking at the extent by which a keyword beats or is beaten by the predicted CTR, you are essentially isolating the natural relationship between CTR and ranking in order to get a better picture of what’s going on.

We found that, on average, if you beat the expected CTR, then you’re far more likely to rank in more prominent positions. Failing to beat the expected CTR makes it more likely you’ll appear in positions 6–10.

So, based on our example of long-tail search terms for this niche, if a page:

• Beats the expected CTR for a given position by 20 percent, you’re likely to appear in position 1.
• Beats the expected CTR for a given position by 12 percent, then you’re likely to appear in position 2.
• Falls below the expected CTR for a given position by 6 percent, then you’re likely to appear in position 10.

And so on.

Here’s a greatly simplified rule of thumb:

The more your pages beat the expected organic CTR for a given position, the more likely you are to appear in prominent organic positions.

If your pages fall below the expected organic Google search CTR, then you’ll find your pages in lower organic positions on the SERP.

Want to move up by one position in Google’s rankings? Increase your CTR by 3%. Want to move up another spot? Increase your CTR by another 3%.

If you can’t beat the expected click-through rate for a given position, you’re unlikely to appear in positions 1–5.

Essentially, you can think of all of this as though Google is giving bonus points to pages that have high click-through rates. The fact that it looks punitive is just a natural side effect.

If Google gives “high CTR bonus points” to other websites, then your relative performance will decline. It’s not that you got penalized; it’s just that you didn’t get the rewards.

Four crucial ways to raise your Google CTRs

Many “expert” SEOs will tell you not to waste time trying to maximize your CTRs since it’s supposedly “not a direct ranking signal.” “Let’s build more links and make more infographics,” they say.

I couldn’t disagree more. If you want to rank better, you need to get more people to your website. (And getting people to your website is the whole point of ranking anyway!)

AdWords and many other technologies look at user engagement signals to determine page quality and relevance. We’ve already seen evidence that CTR is important to Google.

So how do you raise your Google CTRs – not just for a few days, but in a sustained way? You should focus your efforts in four key areas:

1. Optimize pages with low “organic Quality Scores.” Download all of your query data from the Google Search Console. Sort your data, figure out which of your pages have below average CTRs, and prioritize those. Don’t risk turning one of your unicorn pages with an awesome CTR into a donkey with a terrible CTR! It’s far less risky turning a donkey into unicorn!
2. Combine your SEO keywords with emotional triggers to create irresistible headlines. Emotions like anger, disgust, affirmation, and fear are proven to increase click-through rates and conversion rates. If everyone who you want to beat already has crafted optimized title tags, then packing an emotional wallop will give you the edge you need and make your listing stand out.
3. Work to improve other user engagement metrics. Like click-through rate, we believe you need to have better-than-expected engagement metrics (e.g. time on site and bounce rate). This is a critical relevance signal! Google has enough data to know the expected conversion and engagement rates based on a variety of factors (e.g. industry, query, location, time of day, device type). If your content performs well, you’re likely going to get a rankings boost. If your content does poorly, there’s not necessarily a penalty, but you definitely won’t get any bonus points.
4. Use social media ads and remarketing to increase search volume and CTR. Paid social ads and remarketing display ads can generate serious awareness and exposure for a reasonable cost (no more than $50 a day). If people aren’t familiar with your brand, bombard your target audience with Facebook and Twitter ads. People who are familiar with your brand are 2x more likely to click through and to convert!

Just say no to low Google CTRs!

You want to make sure your pages get as many organic search clicks as possible. Doing so means more people are visiting your site, which will send important signals to Google that your page is relevant and awesome.

Our research also shows that above-expected user engagement metrics result in better organic rankings, which results in even more clicks to your site.

Don’t settle for average CTRs. Be a unicorn in a sea of donkeys! Raise your CTRs and engagement rates! Get optimizing now!

This article was originally published on the Word Stream blog, reprinted with permission.

The post Why you NEED to raise organic CTR (and 4 ways to do it) appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

And all CTR studies (that I’m aware of) show the overwhelming majority of clicks on organic listings landing on positions 1-10 (or 1-11).

Desktop CTR according to the recent NetBooster study.

If we track enough keyword search terms we can begin to build a picture of where traffic is likely to arrive at by applying a CTR model such as the one above.

However, taking CTR out of the equation for a second and focusing just on the keyword rankings (I can already hear an angry mob assembling at the suggestion) we can see how those rankings fluctuate over time – which will obviously affect our organic traffic.

Where those fluctuations seem to occur has some interesting implications with what drives those rankings in the first place: most fluctuations occur after page three.

Some quick thoughts on the graph above:

• Most of the keywords that the site ranks for are on outside of the top two pages, so naturally there is more fluctuation in these positions because there are more keywords in these positions
• This graph alone doesn’t help us to understand which keywords are ranking where (though obviously we can do that) so there’s always a chance that the keywords ranking in position 1-3 on any given day are not the same keywords that rank in those positions next time we check (but where the first point was intended to show an understanding of the odds, this one seems like a bit of a long shot)
• Not every graph looks like this – but many do. It’s possible to start noticing trends in certain industries/SERPs too.

The most significant consideration is that the grey bars don’t really show the number of keywords ranking on a certain page but the number of keywords ranking at all. The site above becomes irrelevant for around 500 queries every couple of days and suddenly becomes relevant again a few days later – which happens consistently.

Why might this be happening?

Fluctuation in some SERPs is very pronounced, due to QDF (query deserves freshness). For example, a user searching for the name of a sports team is going to want to find the team’s official site, but also the latest scores, fixtures, news and gossip. As a result, Google will ‘freshen’ its results much more frequently, if not in real time.

However I chose the website above as an example because it operates in the travel space, where results are often less fresh. So let’s choose another example:

The graph above shows an ecommerce retailer – arguably the biggest ecommerce store in the UK in this particular space (tweet me the answer and I might give you a prize). The fluctuations take much longer but are still wholly consistent. The site is affected by seasonality (more stock in around Christmas, for instance, and a nice injection of inbound links when this year’s Christmas must-haves are announced) but not really affected by freshness.

It might be argued that strong rankings on some keywords are a result of the site being well-optimised for lucrative keywords and largely ignored for keywords that won’t drive revenue (which is fair enough), but the content doesn’t change consistently on all those other pages or on the pages of any other large site in the industry.

And on the same subject, assuming SEO practitioners are responsible for the site ranking well for certain keywords, we would have to assume that all sites in the SERPs (multiple SERPs – the graphs feature many hundreds of keywords on the first couple of pages) are acquiring links at almost exactly the same rate, or that links are hardly a factor at all.

Here’s what we think: the fluctuations are because the ranking factors are so different after page two compared to the top 10 or 20 results. Other factors take more precedence – PageRank, for instance – after this point.

On the first page or two, Google has enough click data to make a robust ranking algorithm. After this point they don’t have the data they need.

Which keywords are we looking at?

For the graphs to be generated we must input keywords manually. The keywords that we’re visualising are exclusively keywords we want to see: no brand terms and no junk terms from slightly off-topic blog posts. As a result we’re able to get a better picture of an industry rather than just a picture of a site’s overall visibility for every keyword it ranks for, accidentally or otherwise.

When (not provided) made attributing search traffic to specific keywords impossible in analytics it became necessary to track keyword rankings both more frequently and in larger numbers.

Where once a client’s SEO report may have contained the hundred or so keywords we cared about most we now track thousands of keywords for the businesses we work with. If we experience a fluctuation in traffic we need to know where we have potentially lost or gained visitors.

Though we’re reporting on far more keywords now than we ever have before this obviously doesn’t change what a client does or does not rank for. The advantages are that…

• We have a more comprehensive list of opportunities – keywords that are relevant but do not perform as well as possible (bottom of page 1, top of page 2 etc.) are obvious focus points that enable us to increase relevant traffic through changing meta data or content, for example
• We are able to ‘bucket’ or group large numbers of keywords together and estimate traffic for a particular service we offer or location we operate in
• We can make an informed decision about whether a single page is relevant for too many terms and therefore we should look to create a separate page or subpage, or when two pages are competing for the same search rankings and should be combined to provide a better user experience

The obvious disadvantage is that we have moved from a model where we may track 100 traffic driving keywords to a model where we report on those 100 keywords as well as potentially 900 more that do not perform as strongly or drive as much traffic, which we would largely say is a waste of time for a client to report to their superiors.

For this reason we developed a dashboard that allows us to present this information in a meaningful way, allowing clients to filter the information however they want, without removing the granularity we need to be able to monitor.

Why does this matter?

The difference between positions one and two for a competitive keyword is down to number and quality of links, right? Site B just needs more, better links to overtake site A? Wrong. This hasn’t been the case for a long time. We’ve been saying for years that if you’ve got enough links to rank fifth then you’ve got enough links to rank first.

The implications are also interesting across different industries, which we’re looking into and I’ll follow up with another blog post soon. It looks to us like Google is turning the prevalence of PageRank right down in SERPs it considers ‘spammy. In gambling, for example, CTR is a much stronger ranking signal than in other sectors: sites with better sign-up bonuses etc. get more clicks and as a consequence tend to rank quite well. From a search engine perspective it makes no sense to treat all sites equally when nine of the top 10 are buying poor quality links, en mass.

Former Google Engineer (officially current Google Engineer) Matt Cutts stated in a Webmaster video in May 2011 that in SERPs such as porn, where people don’t link (naturally), Google largely ignores the link graph and focuses on other metrics to provide ranking data. We don’t have any ranking data for porn sites because nobody has ever paid us to do that – so if you’re listening PornHub, you know where to find me (please use my Twitter handle, not my IP address).

Do you think something else is at play here? Search Engine Watch would love to hear your opinion in the comments.

The post Click-through rate (CTR) might beat PageRank for Google’s top search results appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Google’s intention is to provide users the best possible Web experience, and in this case, that means giving users some of the information they need before they even click the link. As a collaborative effort between Google Research and WebTables research teams, structured snippets are going to change the way people find information on the Web, and you’ll need to adjust your optimization strategies as a result.

What Are Rich Snippets and Structured Snippets?

First, it’s important that we define exactly what “rich snippets” and “structured snippets” are. Some marketers have been using the terms interchangeably, but this is not accurate. Structured snippets are a type of rich snippet, and will not apply to every query.

Rich snippets exist to enhance the results pages and give users more information about what they’re searching for. For example, searching for a movie could result in brief excerpts of reviews or a synopsis of the film. This allows the user to, at a glance, get some preliminary information about their search query before clicking on any links. Rich snippets are pulled from specially formatted data on websites, which Google actually helps you build, so you can include information that you want your potential searchers to see.

Currently, Google offers rich snippet support for several types of content, including:

• Information on people
• Product specifications
• Business and organization information
• Reviews of products and features
• Recipes for food items
• Events and music
• Video content

Structured snippets, on the other hand, offer specific information about a given query based on aggregated Web results. This means it can completely ignore meta data structures, and instead search for key information sitting out there on the Web. For example, if you search for the movie Die Hard, Google could search the Web for significant pages about Die Hard (such as IMDB and Wikipedia entries), and produce a structured snippet with information like the release date, main cast, and director.

The best example currently is one you can try yourself — search for “nikon d7100” and scroll down to the dpreview.com entry. You’ll see a handful of facts, including the camera’s resolution, weight, and display size.

How Will This Affect Click-Through Rates?

Some search marketers are justifiably concerned that offering more information on search results pages will reduce click-through rates, and therefore organic traffic. After all, if a user finds exactly what he/she is looking for on the first page of Google without the need to click any links, why would he/she?

The simple answer is that it probably will affect your organic traffic, with all other factors remaining equal. But you probably don’t need to worry about it affecting your bottom line. For example, if a user is only looking for the dimensions of a given product, that user is unlikely to buy your product whether they find that information on the SERP or whether they click through and find that information on your site. True, you’ll miss out on a bit of brand visibility and a few opportunities to convert on-the-fence users, but for the most part, structured snippets shouldn’t affect the number of people going through the sales process on your site.

How Do I Make Sure My Snippets Are Accurate?

Rich snippets and structured snippets differ in several ways, but the most important for search marketers trying to take action is this: rich snippets require you to structure your data in a way that Google can read, while structured snippets are automatically pulled from aggregated site data, regardless of how it is marked up. That means it’s far easier to control your rich snippet information than any structured snippet information that appears.

If you’re trying to build the most enticing and informative snippet possible for your Web pages, focus on optimizing for rich snippets. As explained by Google, there are three steps to creating rich snippets that provide valuable information to your customers.

Step One: Select a markup format

Google reads three formats of microdata for rich snippets, and it’s up to your personal preference which one you choose for your site. Microdata is the most popular and most recommended format, but Microformats and RDFa are also acceptable.

Step Two: Apply your markup format

Once you’ve selected a format type, you can apply it to any or all of the content types supported (listed above under “What Are Rich Snippets and Structured Snippets?”).

Step Three: Test

If you think you’ve got everything in order for the rich snippets you need, there’s just one more step: testing. It’s important to test your work because there’s always a chance that a coding error or an improperly formatted set of data is interfering with the way it’s displayed. Fortunately, Google offers a free, official Structured Data Testing Tool that can give you an accurate preview of any URL as it would appear (snippets and all) in the SERPs.

If you do want to make sure your structured snippets provide the most accurate information possible, all you can do is write the most accurate content. Google uses machine learning algorithms and complex crawling analyses to pluck out the most relevant information on given pages. That means there’s no direct way to control what appears in the SERP entry; you can only give the Google bots the best information to work with.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Search?

This addition once again demonstrates Google’s unflinching dedication to providing users with the best online experience, regardless of how it affects businesses who have built their strategies around search marketing. It also shows us a peek at Google’s long-term strategy: building an artificial means of understanding abstract, unorganized information and presenting it in an organized, meaningful, and concise way.

For the average Web user, structured snippets are a step in a futuristic and exciting direction. It takes us one step closer to a reality where one input can give us exactly the information we’re looking for, with no click-throughs or browsing necessary. But for businesses, that’s a scary eventuality. Right now, structured snippets only give users a handful of basic facts, meaning conversion rates won’t significantly drop and Web traffic will only be affected minimally. But what if the Google Knowledge Graph starts to produce more and more information, antiquating the old style of clicking on a link to learn more information? It’s a realistic possibility, if a far-off one.

Still, as a search marketer, it’s a little too early to be talking about a search marketing doomsday. Structured snippets are an enhancement to current search results — nothing more. Do what you can to provide the most accurate, relevant information to your site visitors, optimize your site with proper microdata formatting to get quality rich snippets, and maintain your adherence to best practices for user experience. Even with the interference of structured snippets, your search marketing campaign should continue to remain effective.

Image via Shutterstock.

The post Your Guide to Structured Snippets for SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Understanding what interactions and behaviors are taking place on your site can provide a great amount of guidance as to what you may need to revise on your site to affect conversion rates. The first step in finding reason from the analytical data is realizing that your site users fall into several groups. First and foremost, converters and non-converters, but also several others such as by age group, new vs. returning user, mobile vs. desktop, and so on. Each of these user groups have different needs as well as perceptions of your site. It is up to you to identify there interactions and behavior and take more non-converters and transition them into the converters.

Roll Up Your Sleeves

Our analysis starts with setting custom dimensions. These analytical filters allow us to initially review two type of visitors, those who convert and those who don’t. For many of the sections below it will help to set these segments so you can see the differences between groups. Lucky for us, Google Analytics has predefined segments for converters and non-converters.

Choosing only one segment at a time to view the following areas in Google Analytics.

User Flow

Review the typical user through the site by converter and non-converter. First, where does a converter typically enter the site and how many pages do they traverse before converting? Second, where does the non-converter typically enter the site and how many pages do they traverse before we notice a considerable exit rate/drop off.

For the converters, is there a noticeable rhythm of great internal linking to keep them traveling through the conversion funnel from the starting point(page)?

For non-converters, where are most people entering the site? Where we see the drop-off primarily happening, is there a lack of calls to action, links to related content, or confusion in navigational linking?

Content Drilldown

While User Flow is a nifty visual for understand page progression and drop-off rates, Content Drilldown is an alternative data view for those a little more linearly inclined providing a table view for you to walk through top content pathways from within our custom segments. Now go your site and click through these pathways and gain an understanding of what may be providing reasons for users to leave the site.

Mobile

Now that we have a general understanding of overarching user flow behaviors of our converters vs. non-converters, we can likely start coming up with a little more insight on where we may be able to improve our conversation optimization efforts based on who these users are and where they are coming from. Since mobile traffic is all the rage these days and its contribution to overall site traffic is on the rise, let’s review our two segments within this analytical vertical.

(Hmm… I think we have a conversion issue with mobile)

Does your percentage of conversions from mobile users compare with the percentage of overall mobile traffic which contributes to total site traffic? If mobile conversions are 2 percent of total conversions and 20 percent of overall traffic, you may have an issue.

Demographics

With our minds still surrounding the segmentation of converter and non-converter, let’s know look at demographic data. We understand how these two types are walking through the site, but who are they? By reviewing gender and age group data with secondary dimensions set to Landing Page, you can get a much better understanding of what demographic lens you need to wear when reviewing certain pages. To gain a better understanding of these underperforming demographics, create a custom segment based on this demographic and review User Flow or Content Drilldown to assess their entire journey through the site and where drop off is likely occurring.

Do call to actions and internal linking on specific landing pages speak to the interests of that gender or age group? For example, your older female age group may be suffering a low conversion rate. If you are selling Osteoporosis supplements and internal linking on a major landing page for this segment to related articles and resources for sports related injuries, you aren’t providing enticing pathways to avoid site drop-offs.

Reverse Goal Path

We have walked through site pages by converter and non-converter segment as they traversed the site but another angle to help assess is via reverse goal path. Of course we now walk away from having to segment by converter and non-converter, as we know that this view is only from those who have converted into said site objectives. In this section we will take a look at the conversion point and what pages recently provided the last few steps to conversion. This is where we will want to walk a few pages back in the conversion funnel and assess calls to action. We know what works and can now compare that with pages we saw earlier which were high drop off points. How can we revise the drop off pages to be more like these conversion funnel landmarks?

Funnel Visualization

For those that have taken an analytical review of improving conversions before, this is one of the oldest methods of conversion optimization review provided by Google Analytics. We have walked through a few user types and their pathways through your site, but Funnel Visualization concentrates more so toward the latter part of the conversion process. Here, we can access drop-off issues in the final steps of the conversion process.

If users are dropping out of the funnel but not exiting, what pages are they going to? Why are you providing links in the end conversion process to usher them away from the site?

Multi-Channel Attribution

I think one of the most powerful advancements in Google Analytics over the past few years is multi- channel attribution. It has provided a great wealth of what channels work well together and helped marketers form the mindset that it isn’t just SEO, paid, social, etc. – these channels often times work together. A quick glance under the hood here can let you know a lot more goal information than a quick last touch by default goal attribution by medium view. For example, you may have seen an organic sales slide in the last few months and never realized that paid search is a channel that serves as a first touch point with the site and they return days later via organic. When you axed your paid search budget a few months back, it may be hurting you more than you think!

See, That Was Easy

The beautiful thing about Google Analytics is that there is still a myriad of comparative views we can undertake. We didn’t even take a look at obvious areas of review such as exit pages and sorting landing pages by bounce rate, etc. What I did want to do is provide a few fairly easy ways to review your conversion optimization potential utilizing deeper analytics offerings from Google Analytics via segmentation. The above will likely only take you a few hours to complete, but a few hours that could help you ramp up the conversion percentage of your site visitors.

The post Using Analytical Analysis to Help Improve Conversions appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

The study – the first of a three-part series analyzing CTR for mobile and desktop users – collected data over 90 days during the summer to avoid any seasonal impact on the results.

The Findings

First and foremost the study found that if you’re not first, you might as well be last. The most significant findings of the CTR study are those showing mobile behavior. The first ranking result comes in at 27.7 percent CTR, and drops to just 9.2 percent for the second-placed search result. This study claims to be the first to compile a comprehensive data set of CTR for mobile.

When reviewing desktop metrics, CTR rates fell by 7.9 percent from the first ranking result to the second.

The study also included desktop results for branded versus non-branded CTR. As evidenced by the chart below, the top-ranked branded result has a 22 percent higher CTR than the number two spot. However, once you reach the fifth ranking result, the CTR stays consistent through the 10th ranking result.

When reviewing the data for non-branded keywords, a much more consistent decline in results is even clearer.

What Makes This Study Different?

• The team analyzed more than 2 billion imprecisions and 2.6 million clicks
• Clients agreed to provide access to their data for research purposes
• This is the first CTR study that drills down into mobile behaviors

To provide more insight into the results, SEW spoke with Ryan Heuser, senior technical account manager of seoClarity, and primary author of the study.

SEW: Do you attribute the gap between CTR on desktop and mobile purely to the platform? Or do you believe the user habits to be different, therefore causing the gap between Rank 1 and Rank 2?

Heuser: I don’t believe one factor independently contributes to the gap, as there are a number of variables such as user intent. User behavior certainly plays a role, such as if a user wants to quickly find information on a search they’ll be more apt to click the first available link with relevant content to find their answer. Customized results and local intent further impact the results page and inevitably influence click through rates.

SEW: When analyzing mobile results, did you differentiate between those that used the Google app and those that used the standard browser on their mobile device?

Heuser: For the study we used Google Webmaster Tools as presented and did not segregate the results for mobile between app or browser. I do not believe it would impact the data in any significant manner.

SEW: How much do you believe changes in search engine algorithm will affect samples like the ones collected for this study in 2015 and beyond?

Heuser: The best studies are those done recently and with a large sample size because of that exact reason of the algorithm changing. Not only does the result set change, but the lay out and display can as well. It would be beneficial to see the study done on a recurring basis to provide the most actionable data.

SEW: As the author of this study, what data points/results do you believe are the most surprising?

Heuser: Certainly the percentage and thereby the value behind ranking in the first position on a mobile was interesting, but I believe it’s understandable considering the custom and local results, as well as the need for speed of knowledge.

The most surprising points beyond that are the higher percentage in position 4 vs. 3 on mobile, which seems to be related to user behavior (aka fat thumb scrolling) and the higher percentages for position 10 vs. 9 (both desktop and mobile) that further speaks to user behavior (part of the reason ad space is sold at the bottom of the page).

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