In the early 1990s, Website owners figured out the more traffic their sites got, the more advertising dollars became available. And from that “me make fire” leap in Internet evolution, the search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) profession was born.
In the beginning, the prime directive of optimizing your Website was to get it to appear as high in the search engine results pages (SERPs) as possible. Like many things in life, everyone wanted to be No. 1. Not much has changed in the last 10-15 years. The benchmark for successful SEO has been appearing on the first page of search results. The methods of successful SEO, however, are constantly evolving – but that’s a post for another day.
Last month, I discovered a new option in my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard called “Search queries.” I clicked on it and found a bevy of information that could alter the course of how SEO professionals benchmark their success.
Not only do we get to see which search terms are leading people to our pages, but we get to see where our sites ranked in the SERPs, how many times we appeared in a SERP (i.e., impressions), how many times people actually clicked on our results, and subsequently, the clickthrough rate for each particular search term. Not only can you see all this information, but you can sort it by category.
This new set of information changes the way we look at SEO. In the past, we optimized sites to help them appear high in the SERPs. It was understood that sites ranking high in the SERPs got more traffic because people usually trust what the search engines consider the top results. But now Website owners can actually look at the clickthrough rates of the search terms and see whether or not being at or near the top actually translates into meaningful traffic.
What good is it to appear No. 1 in Google for “splendid widgets” if no one is clicking through to your site? If this is the case, there is a problem, and it’s probably with how your site is optimized. Either your meta description isn’t worded properly, or your page title doesn’t convey the proper keyword-rich information. But, then again, if that’s the case, then why is the search engine ranking you No. 1? Only they can answer that question, and my bet is that they won’t. Regardless, if you’re not getting the clickthroughs, it’s time to re-evaluate your site’s SEO.
Conversely, you can also discover keywords and phrases that send traffic to your site that you may not have been aware of. If this is the case, jump on it and consider optimizing your site, or a page on your site, to specifically target those search terms. For example, four of the top five search terms for which my personal site appears in SERPS have something to do with Texas Longhorns Cheerleaders, or some variation of the term. All because I posted a photo of some rather frightening looking Texas Longhorns cheerleaders prior to the BCS national championship game. That was nearly six months ago and I still get considerable searches and traffic from that post. I have more than 1,500 blog posts and that one is the most popular.
The bottom line is that it’s not enough to be No. 1 on Google. We have to dig deeper with tools like “search queries” and see if being No. 1 is resulting in traffic. If it’s not, then we need to rethink how we’re optimizing our sites.
*Note: Yahoo Site Explorer recently launched a similar tool called “Top Queries – Beta,” but the results have not been nearly as robust as Google. We’ll keep an eye on it and hopefully we’ll start seeing more data in the months ahead.
