mobilebadboy
04-18-2010, 01:25 AM
I've been examining the new top search query data in Google's webmaster tools and it has led me to believe that I must be doing something wrong. Maybe, maybe not. For every X number of impressions it's showing for a particular keyword search where I rank very well, the CTR is very low -- 5% or less.
Example.
The top query for one of my sites is a three word phrase (those are the 3 words I'm targeting). I show up in the 3rd spot the majority of the time for this search (just behind the actual website I'm promoting). For the particular date range I'm looking at it's showing 320 impressions with only 22 clickthroughs, 7% (overall 480 impressions, 22 c/t, 5% -- the rest of the positions are <10).
When my result comes up it shows as (snippet is meta description):
Bobs Blue Widget
Bobs Blue Widget offers abc and xyz.
http://domain.com/directory/bobs-blue-widget.php
Three times the three word phrase shows, I'm the third result, yet I'm losing 93% of the searchers.
This particular section of this particular site is the producer of most of my income. Since I put these pages up years ago I've been very skittish about changing anything on them. I never did anything to try and get these pages to rank, they just did (as opposed to everything I try to desperately rank for and cant).
I just can't seem to grasp why I'm showing that many times, that high, and yet being overlooked over 90% of the time with all the keywords in place that the user is searching for. If I could make positive changes to influence a better CTR and not sacrifice my ranking then I would, but we know how changes go with the SEs, especially Google. Not quite sure how to move forward with this (I'm a statistics freak just for the record).
Example.
The top query for one of my sites is a three word phrase (those are the 3 words I'm targeting). I show up in the 3rd spot the majority of the time for this search (just behind the actual website I'm promoting). For the particular date range I'm looking at it's showing 320 impressions with only 22 clickthroughs, 7% (overall 480 impressions, 22 c/t, 5% -- the rest of the positions are <10).
When my result comes up it shows as (snippet is meta description):
Bobs Blue Widget
Bobs Blue Widget offers abc and xyz.
http://domain.com/directory/bobs-blue-widget.php
Three times the three word phrase shows, I'm the third result, yet I'm losing 93% of the searchers.
This particular section of this particular site is the producer of most of my income. Since I put these pages up years ago I've been very skittish about changing anything on them. I never did anything to try and get these pages to rank, they just did (as opposed to everything I try to desperately rank for and cant).
I just can't seem to grasp why I'm showing that many times, that high, and yet being overlooked over 90% of the time with all the keywords in place that the user is searching for. If I could make positive changes to influence a better CTR and not sacrifice my ranking then I would, but we know how changes go with the SEs, especially Google. Not quite sure how to move forward with this (I'm a statistics freak just for the record).