Hi,
these are roughly the click through rates for organic search (the
data is from AOL).
Results in:
Total Searches: 9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623
% of clicks
Click Rank1: 2,075,765 42.13%
Click Rank2: 586,100 11.90%
Click Rank3: 418,643 8.50%
Click Rank4: 298,532 6.06%
Click Rank5: 242,169 4.92%
Click Rank6: 199,541 4.05%
Click Rank7: 168,080 3.41%
Click Rank8: 148,489 3.01%
Click Rank9: 140,356 2.85%
Click Rank10: 147,551 2.99%
1st page: 4,425,226 89.82%
2nd page: 501,397 10.18%
http://www.jimboykin.com/click-rate-for-top-10-search-results/
(Take a look at the comments, that's where the actual percentages
were posted)
What I was wondering: Couldn't one use these CTR's to see how
the "title copy" of each page performs? As in..comparing the click
through rate of each page to the average/expected CTR (for the given
rank)?
I thought maybe it would even be possible to code a small tool for
tihs purpose (in SEO we have tons of such mini-tools).
I've been told that the CTRs depended a lot on the actual industry
(I guess this means for industries with a web-savy target audience
or for high-ticket items searchers are more likely to look
thoroughly at the search results instead of blindly clicking no. 1,
which a group of non-web savy people would be likely to do thinking
no.1 is always the best result).
I think that might not necessarily be a big problem, though:
If it's done by "hand", it shouldn't be too hard to see how much the
click through rates differ from the average results (as they will
differ from industry to industry). Of course, it would be hard to
pinpoint the click through rate one should have for a certain page
(at a certain rank in the search results), but it could help
identify outliers, that have abnormally low click-through rates.
Sort of what Avinash did when he blogged about leveraging
statistical control limits to see what's worth looking at.
If it was a tool..it could for example compute the average
difference between the average CTRs (from the AOL data) and the CTRs
of the pages of your website..and that way compute an expected CTR
for the search ranks for the field that your site is competing
in...okay I think somebody with a deeper knowledge in statistics
than myself would have to do that ;) as its probably a lot more
complicated then what I just typed..
Making the effort of coding or having someone code such a tool (that
works) seems big, but I bet it could be a surprise to see how many
outliers there are that are worth looking at (and testing different
title copies).
Ive heard great title copy could often improve the CTR by a factor
of 2 or 3. I dont remember where I heard/read this and am wondering
if its even possible to get such exact data, but I dont doubt, that
good title copy can help grab a larger piece of the traffic.
However, this might be a bit over the top as most sites usually
spend their resources on optimizing for..a not overly high amount of
keywords. Thus a tool might be a bit over the top...
I'm sure many sites could gain a significant amount of traffic (at a
reasonable cost) by testing different title copies (written by a
copywriter/somebody who knows enough about copywriting).
Every direct marketer/copy writer knows that the header of an
advertisment is the most important part as it has to get people
to "stop" and start reading. I think the title tags displayed in the
search results are no different from that.
How do you guys feel about these ideas? (Im afraid the tool idea is
really a bit over the top..)
---------------------------------------
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