After testing over a few months, and today reviewing the numbers, I am conclusively satisfied that the click through rate you get from the SERPs is a significant factor on your rankings overall, and perhaps more so than ever before... When looking at some (12) of my sites that were starting to rank over the last month, I noticed that when a site first appears on page 1, it bounces around a fair bit - usually bottom, middle, and top 3. It can change hourly, but certainly daily. What's new about this, you say? Nothing new about dancing around - but, what I think happens during that dance is that the G algo experiments with sending more eyeballs to your result in the SERPs, and the higher the CTR, the better the algo considers the match to be, and therefore, the higher your overall position when it settles down. I tested this by giving some sites really attractive titles, ie "[city][service] - best price guaranteed - call [phone]" and then the meta description was written like a marketing headline, encouraging users to click through. On other sites, I used really boring titles and descriptions like "[company name][city]" and a boring meta description, so as to attract a lower click through rate. The sites that had killer titles and meta descriptions settled in the top 3, and the sites that had boring titles and metas (and hence lower CTR's) settled either mid-page or lower page. In summary: do not ignore your title and description of the ranking page - I think it plays a big role in determining your eventual 'settled down' ranking on page 1. The theory makes sense in the bigger picture too - G has an inherently vested interest in giving users the best experience, so logic dictates that a listing with a higher CTR is a better and more relevant match than a listing with a lower CTR, and therefore a better user experience. The potential downside of having a super attractive search result is that once you get the clicks, if you don't keep them on your site for a reasonable period of time and they instead bounce back to G, that will negatively affect your rankings. But, you should be very focused on making your content relevant to the searchers intent in any event, and therefore, shouldn't have that problem.
Good Read for the day. But if we use call to action words like "click here" i think there would be bad effects
I think "click here" is probably the worst thing you could use... your CTR would plummet. I think the best thing is to consider what the searchers intent is likely to be, and then consider what words would resonate with that intent.
Do you want to get BANNED ? I'm reporting you now! Reason : "Copy pasting the same post on same thread for increasing the post count"
Great insight. If this is true, that rankings are actually affected by CTR that means, that the better the copy of the page the more sustainable the rankings will be. There could be a numerous ways to keep user engaged, but it doesn't give you any point of reference to be honest. I mean - what metrics are good metrics?
It's all relative, I guess. I don't think G presupposes any particular CTR as being 'good', I think they instead track yours vs your competitors for that particular search term.
I tested this briefly over the Christmas period using microworkers, site was already on page 1 though so only tested position, seemed to bump it up a few. Depending on budget, I'd say that buying a link returns better results than CTR faking overall, although it is good for a temporary boosts during busy periods though (aka Christmas). FPS
If, after clicking through, the visitors add the website to their social media accounts, then it also affects ranking. The 'black' method described by FutureProofSeo has its advantage here as you can pay the workers for adding you in their social media.
Cool. Nice share.. Lets try this step . need to test out even not tried and heard before.. Great work
