Is this an overlooked SEO secret?

[luckyred]

Hi everyone,

First post - nice to meet you all.

Let's talk about SEO and ways to make sure you really are getting the O part down (the optimization part!). Getting to the number 1 position in Google is important, but don't forget to make sure you get the highest organic clickthrough you can. But how can you measure your organic click through, you ask?

It’s easy to find out how many people come to your site from organic traffic through Google Analytics, but here’s a question that you may also find helpful to consider:


How many times has my site ranked #1 for a given search term, but users have decided to click on someone else?

This dilemma came up after logging into Google Webmaster tools and navigating to “Your site on the web” then “Top Search Queries”.
This section displays your high ranking search terms, important in and of themselves, plus a very valuable metric – Clickthough


Note: If you rank for a specific domain of Google, like Google.com.au, you need to select it from the “All Google domains” drop-down.
So, what does this data mean? According to Googles' help page for this:
Each table contains the following columns:

• #: The ranking of the search query.
• %: The percentage of the top 100 queries represented by each query. For example, if the top 100 queries represent 1,000 user searches, and those users searched for cheeseburger recipe 270 times, that query would represent 27% of the total number of searches for the top 100 queries.
• Query: The search terms used.
• Position: The highest position any page from your site ranked for that query, averaged over the last week. Since our index is dynamic, this may not be the same as the current position of your site for this query.

and…
Stats that may be available are:

• Impressions: The top Google searches in which your site appeared, along with your site’s average ranking in those search results.
• Clickthrough: The top Google searches from which users clicked through to your site.

This data can provide valuable information about your site. We recommend the following steps:

• Compare Impressions and Clickthrough to identify how you can improve your content. There are several steps you can take to make your content appear more compelling so that users click your site in search results pages. Your page title appears in the results, so make sure it’s relevant and accurage. Google can display the text in your pages’ meta descriptions in search results, so review your meta descriptions.

The Point: Getting to the number 1 position in Google is important, but let’s make sure that your site has a compelling title and meta description so that searchers will clickthrough to you.


The best feature of this Top Search Query tool is the quick display of where your site ranks in search results for given keywords. The opportunity here is to find out which rankings you already have and monetize them accordingly. If you are currently holding the number one rank for twenty keywords of value, it’s time to take advantage.


Taken from a new blog I've started (haven't really done anything SEO wise on it yet, just putting together the base).

[luckyred]

Another interesting tool: Find out your competitors traffic for free

So, you want to know, for free, how much traffic a competitors website gets?
The easiest way to find this out is using the new trafficestimate dot com site, which is surprisingly powerful and accurate (I believe it’s based on Korean data – not too sure though, comments would be appreciated on this). Remember, the URL is Traffic Estimate, so I wouldn’t use it to argue a point with someone looking at the actual, internal analytics.
But, you ask, is it accurate? In recent experience, Traffic Estimate proved be accurate within 10% for a site that receives about 30K hits each month. Very impressive! I mean seriously… that’ awesome. One issue that exists is measuring the traffic of sites that receive less that 5k hits each month… doesn’t seem to have enough to put together a figure. Any webmasters that are keen to check the accuracy of this service against their own sites and post below are welcomed and would be appreciated.

[Ryan6]

Would prefer a keyword friendly title and a simple description in the meta.

[dburk]

Hi luckyred,

That website in your post is broken.

I think that Compete.com or Quantcast.com would be much better places to get data about your competitors website traffic.

[luckyred]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi luckyred,

That website in your post is broken.

I think that Compete.com or Quantcast.com would be much better places to get data about your competitors website traffic.

Thanks, traffic estimate . com has been a bit over recently. Never tried compete.com (so thank you).

Next question here is one of the elusive obvious - are the quantcast demographic analytics worth a salt? I mean, really truly, how in the world can that much data be revealed accurately!?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by luckyred

Next question here is one of the elusive obvious - are the quantcast demographic analytics worth a salt? I mean, really truly, how in the world can that much data be revealed accurately!?

I personally consider them to be the best source for this type of data anywhere in the world.

This wikipedia article about Quantcast does a fairly decent job explaining how they are able to compile this data. I have dozens of sites that are directly measured by Quantcast and I have to say that their data has always been spot on.