Can you prove you are worthy of your google rankings
As almost all of us here are doing, I am desperately trying to climb up the SERPs to attract more, ( actually some ), traffic to turn into paying customers. I've read quite a few posts talking about sites that climb up and reach a top ten position only to fall back down pretty quickly, and a recent webinar I viewed may hold the answer.
The presenter talked about the fact that google are implementing more techniques to try and filter out poor sites and one of the metrics they are looking at is click through rates. Google know that if you are in position #1 then you should be attracting around 30% click throughs. Position #10 gets about 3% with a range in between.
So if you are lucky enough to have climbed to position #1 but are only seeing a 15% click through then google assumes your site is not as relevant as your SEO efforts claim. They will likely put it up for a manual review or just bump it down the results. Their assumption is that a site below you has more appeal when the searcher scans the results.
The best way to combat this is to ensure your title and description tags are as compelling and relevant to the search term as possible to encourage the click and once you have the click make sure your site content keeps the visitor engaged as long as possible.
The overall message was that even with great SEO you then have to prove your site is worthy of the ranking or you'll head right back down the page.
They were actually claiming that google now ranks 'User Experience' above anything else for SEO value so click through rates, time on site, shares, internal pages visited, comments all play a really important part.
I guess it is just a natural progression of making sure our sites are relevant and full of high quality, valuable, fresh content. If we get this right the rest should follow.
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Do you know after signing up to tag google,where does the code go.Now I am not referring to the code you first use from analytics,it,s because I am not tagged properly that I am not getting any likes.I put a search on the browser bar "How to tag on Analytics" and I signed up but there is a code that you have to post into somewhere on your site that has the word body>,I am not sure where this is,do you think you know what I am referring to and can you help.Many thanks Josh.Mark.......
Hi Mark,
I'm not at all sure I fully understand the query. I would post it as a new question to get a wider population of WA responding as here it is only seen by me and any one following me who chooses to view this thread I think.
Very interesting and good to know. Makes sense, though - to get and keep a top Google ranking, your site had better darn well be worth it.
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Loved this straight forward info. I'm not anywhere near the point of getting high rankings, but this is important to know as I continue to build my site, and add content. Thanks!