Does relative CTR affect organic SEO efforts?
-
Hello fellow MOZ'ers!
Like many of you, I've been reviewing the Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015 Expert Survey and Correlation Data. My SEO Specialist position requires me to create positive SEO results for our clients' organic search ranking campaigns.
As I understand it, "Relative CTR is a valuable number that can show users how their ads are stacking up compared to their competitors ads appearing on the exact same websites."
My question is...Does relative CTR affect organic SEO efforts (positive or negative) in anyway? The campaigns I'm working on do not include AdWords efforts.
Is this a factor I should ignore/look over? Or is there something I can do "organically" to influence this ranking factor in a positive way?
Thanks!
-
My pleasure Randy.
-
Sorry for the late respond Dave.
Incredible response and answer to my question.
I appreciate the time and effort that went into your response. I will share this with our development team and discuss.
Best,
Randy
-
You're bringing up a subject that's much disputed in the SEO community as I'm sure you well know. I note this so you'll take my answer as educated opinion rather than fact. Before we get into the exact question you're answering it's worth noting a hangout recently in which John Mueller answers a different but related question. In the hangout he was asked whether Google uses onsite user actions as a factor. His answer was "no" and noted that he doesn't believe they know what people are doing in the context of filling out a form or making a purchase and that it's not used as a ranking factor. Conversion and goal tracking aside I choose to believe him as factoring this in would force Google to compare apples and oranges with sites that use Google Analytics sending different signals than those that do not. The reason I mention this is that while he answered that questions and I believe he did so honestly, there's a bigger point in there that ties to your question. So let's get to that ...
Does Google Use Clickthrough Rates?
To answer this we have to answer two things ...
1 - can clickthrough rates provide a positive signal on a site's likelihood in addressing the searchers need, and
2 - can this create false positives?The answer to both of these questions is "yes". If a site appears in the search results and is clicked by a user that is a signal that the site likely matches the users need. If I searched for "blue widgets" and a site with a title like "Exclusively Red Widgets | OnlyRedWidgets.com" appeared in the results then it would likely have a low clickthrough rate and that can be used as a signal. The signal shouldn't count as an overall quality-of-site signal, just a signal based on that specific query as the site might be a great supplier of red widgets. Now, this leads us to the second question, can it give false positives?
Let's image that red widget site used the title "Red & Blue Widgets Galore" but still only sold red widgets. This is where functions to address the second question would be necessary and that is tracking the user's site behavior. Since John has said they don't do that in Analytics or, by extension, Chrome, etc. use (and again - I believe him) then we have to look to Google themselves. We can see in the SERP URLs themselves that Google is tracking which sites get clicks. Past that they also know (just like you or I do) when that user is back at Google. So while they may not be tracking the users behavior on a specific site for the SERPs it's certainly possible (dare I say "probable") that they are tracking the time from the click to the site to the searcher's next appearance at Google. Whether said searcher has remained on your site or simply read a blog post there and followed a link to a different article is irrelevant, they have found what they wanted.
What I see is four core scenarios:
1 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and returns quickly to Google and selects another site under the same query. This would be a negative relevancy signal.
2 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and after a good deal of time returns to Google and selects another site under the same query. This would indicate a positive experience where the user was simply seeking additional information or options.
3 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and after either a short or long period of time returns to Google and adjusts their query to a related but different one. This would indicate the user needs to refine their search to find what they want and send neither a positive nor negative signal.
4 - the user clicks a link in the SERPs and after either a short or long period of time returns to Google and adjusts their query to a completely unrelated one. This would indicate the user found what they were looking for and has moved on to another task sending a positive signal.So to your question, I believe the answer is a conditional "yes". Clickthroughs can send a positive signal to Google however that requires that the user found what they wanted to boost the relevancy for that phrase.
The real perk here is this, whether you believe this explanation or not (and again - this is opinion) the actions you need to take are the same. Regardless of whether clickthroughs or even onsite time are a ranking signal the purpose of your site is to attract clicks and satisfy the users so the actions you need to take are the same regardless. One has to love those types of scenarios.
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
-
SEO Audit for Law Website
Hello, One of our client had a 3 page Law website and i am looking for an seo audit tool. What are the things we need to recommend as niche is Law industry. What audit tools would you recommend ? Thanks John
Moz Bar | | Johnroger0 -
How do you use Moz to research related topics?
Like most of the folks here I'm a pretty big fan of the content that comes out through Whiteboard Fridays, and I try to apply the things I learn, but one of the WBF videos that I'm following along with does not do a stellar job of detailing execution using Moz KW Explorer. https://moz.com/blog/related-topics-in-seo-whiteboard-friday Now granted, this came out in 2016, but I still feel the core principle and strategy results in a higher quality piece of content and is still relevant to discovering and understanding searcher task completion requirements, and drafting content that fulfills those requirements. Towards the end Rand sort of mentions that you'll be able to do this with KW explorer, but I'm not really seeing the functionality. The steps I followed were to enter in the keyword in kw explorer, went to keyword suggestions, and selected "based on closely related topics" and ran it, but received no suggestions - came up blank. I then selected "based on broadly related topics" and the same thing happened. I tried this out with the keyword r22, keeping it very broad to start but that didn't seem to work. So what do you all do to perform this sort of research within Moz? Or do you even feel it's relevant in today's Rank Brain driven world?
Moz Bar | | brettmandoes0 -
What is a Good Keyword Organic CTR Score?
Hi Folks! You might have seen my discussion on What Is a Good Keyword Difficulty Score, and this is a continuation of the same vein. Keyword Organic CTR is probably my favorite score we developed in Keyword Explorer and Moz Pro. It looks at the SERP features that appear in a set of results (e.g. an image block, AdWords ads, a featured snippet, or knowledge graph) and then calculates, using CTRs we built off our partnership with Jumpshot's clickstream data, what percent of searchers are likely to click on the organic, web results. For example, in a search query like Nuoc Cham Ingredients, you've got a featured snippet and then a "People Also Ask" feature above the web results, and thus, Keyword Explorer is giving me an Organic CTR Score of 64. This translates directly to an estimated 64% click-through rate to the web results. Compare that to a search query like Fabric Printed Off Grain, where there's a single SERP feature - just the "People Also Ask" box, and it's between the 6th and 7th result. In this case, Keyword Explorer shows an Organic CTR Score of 94, because we estimate that those PAAs are only taking 6% of the available clicks. There are two smart ways you should be using Organic CTR Score: As a way to modify the estimated volume and estimated value of ranking in the web results for a given keyword term/phrase (KW Explorer does this for you if you use the "Lists" and sort based on Potential, which factors in all the other scores, including volume, difficulty, and organic CTR) As a way to identify SEO opportunities outside the normal, organic web results in other SERP features (e.g. in the Nuoc Cham Ingredients SERPs, there's serious opportunity to take over that featured snippet and get some great traffic) OK, so all that said, what's actually a "good" Organic CTR score? Well... If you're doing classic, 10-blue-links style SEO only, 100 is what you want. But, if you're optimizing for SERP features, and you appear in a featured snippet or the image block or top stories or any of those others, you'd probably be very happy to find that CTR was going to those non-web-results sections, and scores in the 40s or 50s would be great (so long as you appear in the right features).
Moz Bar | | randfish12 -
Learn how to use Rank Tracker to analyze rank progress for any given keyword. Get your Daily SEO Fix!
Moz's Rank Tracker tool retrieves search engine rankings for pages and keywords, and stores them for easy comparison later. With it, you can analyze and track rank progress for a keyword or set of keywords that you may not want to include within a Moz Analytics campaign. In today’s Daily SEO Fix, James dives into the tool to show you how to use Rank Tracker to start keeping tabs on the ranking history of a given keyword. This video is part of The Moz Daily SEO Fix tutorial series--Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, and to subscribe to future ones, make sure to visit the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube.
Moz Bar | | kellyjcoop1 -
Unusual "internal links" causing SEO issues?
Hi all, I'm working on an ecommerce site which has been around for almost 20 years. Over the years it has started to suffer in Google's search results and the decision was recently made to completely overhaul the site. We're now very happy with the website's design, and care was taken to maintain page rank via 301s, etc. However, the site has just fallen off the bottom of Google's first search result page (for the first time in years) for our main keyword. I signed up here in the hope of using Moz's SEO tools to help us return to our former glory, but I'm seeing some confusing results: I've run a crawl test on our site, as well as on our two biggest competitors. One thing that really stood out was that we have over 1000 "internal links" to our homepage, whereas our competitors both have around 20-30 (both of which appear at the top of the first SR page). Since the rest of the "on-page SEO" looks OK, I suspect that this could be causing our problems, but I don't understand where this "internal links" number is coming from. Links to our competitor's homepage appear in the navigation bar on every single one of their product pages (which they have about 500 of), yet your report only claims that they have 30 links. The only link to the homepage appears in the site's main navigation bar (which obviously appears on every product page - exactly as it does on our competitors' sites). Additionally, almost every other page on our site apparently has 0 "internal links" and 0 page authority. Is this a problem with Moz's crawl test tool, or is our site actually at fault? The above has been asked directly to Moz staff, but I haven't had a reply. I'd hugely appreciate any words of wisdom from the community. Many thanks in advance. Nick
Moz Bar | | nick45010 -
I am doing the On-page SEO for a website that's never had any SEO done before. I will start with the Pages. Is it necessary to do SEO/Keywords for older Posts?
Using the On-Page Grader to perform SEO on pages of WordPress website. This website never had any SEO done before. Should I go back and perform the same work on the Post Pages?
Moz Bar | | Joseph.Lusso0 -
Why isn't seo moz properly crawling my site?
In my campaign results, only 2 pages have been crawled, when there are many more. Also, when I do the on-page evaluation for my homepage and the main keyword, I get a grade of F, with a ton of errors that my page actually does not have. It's as if SEO moz is having trouble crawling through my site. Any ideas on this?
Moz Bar | | diplomajim0