What’s this about?
I’m intrigued by the stats on the distribution of traffic between organic and paid search results. (I don’t get out much).
Really, it all depends on what you look at, how you cut it, what day of the week it is, and what the phase of the moon is.
I’ve seen numerous reports and stats which vary between the end being nigh for organic, and organic ruling the roost. It depends on what you look at, and how you cut it.
Read the Key Issues, Key Actions and Key Insights in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 6th October 2017.
#SEO #SEONews #SERP #ClickThroughRates
Organic Clicks Going to Paid
Key Issues Summary:
- This is a decent piece of research and analysis from Moz contributed by Brian Key Wood.
- According to their stats, since 2015, Organic click-through rates have dropped by 25% on desktop and 55% on mobile.
- Their assumption is that the disappearing clicks are going to paid search.
- This is across their set of non-branded e-commerce keywords.
- This data set is not the complete picture, but it is an interesting set of data.
Key Actions List:
- It is getting more important to be in the Top 3 for organic SERP.
- If you cannot make it for high volume queries, you should do it for longer tail queries.
- Get ready for the day when there is no organic search result. It is coming.
- In the meantime, focus on the volume of traffic from organic search. Do your best to maximise it and do your best to do something with it.
- Click here to contact me to discuss how to surface your website in the Top 3 organic search results.
Insights & Discussion:
Really, for the ecommerce category, Product Listing Ads (PLAs) have taken over a large portion of search, especially on mobile. This is the main driver of the drop in organic click-through rates for this market.
It is interesting to compare to other recent reports, such as New Study Shows 20% of Google Clicks Go To Number 1, and Google Adwords CTRs Up But Paid Search Down which talk about how there are fewer click on paid search result, although CTRs are up.
Really the whole business of click through rates is a bit of a mess. There is so much other gubbins published on the SERP that it is almost impossible to aggregate properly. Really the most important metric to keep an eye on is not Organic CTR but how much traffic you actually receive from that listing and what you do with it are the really, really, important things.
More Information:
The State of SEO Mid-2017 Released
TL;DR
- Stacks of data from Moz on organic vs paid in SERPs.
- Take all these studies with a pinch of salt and work towards increasing overall traffic from organic, rather than whether you are getting your share.
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
- Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.
