SEO CTR Case Study

@SEOMadHatter - one thing to note: last year, when i was doing this test, I noticed that a page where I initiate a call to action process ends up with a higher ranking vs a page where I just did the basic CTR process.

somehow google likes it when you hit a button, fill out a form and hit submit, then just navigating few pages and leaving the site.

let me know if you are testing this as well or just testing the basic CTR process?
 
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SEOMadHatter said:
It's a custom setup I'm afraid. Just something rough to see if it's worth looking at.



It tries to look human which means it'll sometimes browse around the inner pages as well.



They might well but I've been doing this long enough I don't necessarily think doing it manually is better than good automation. As for proxies - that also might be true but I'd rather have residentials.



It sounds like a great result to me.
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I can code myself not a problem, when I tried to code it using selenium, I observed that google is detecting that I am using selenium. so just curious how you achieved it.
 
Subscribed. Have some questions with CTR Rankings as i am running a similar thing right now. Will get on board after collecting update regarding this from my team :)
 
nice....will be waiting for updates
 
fb3003 said:
@SEOMadHatter - one thing to note: last year, when i was doing this test, I noticed that a page where I initiate a call to action process ends up with a higher ranking vs a page where I just did the basic CTR process.

somehow google likes it when you hit a button, fill out a form and hit submit, then just navigating few pages and leaving the site.

let me know if you are testing this as well or just testing the basic CTR process?
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How does google knows if someone filled a form on our site?
 
Nandhugp said:
How does google knows if someone filled a form on our site?
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the same logic/code/model/algrothym they use to figure out dwell time, ctr, is used to see if you have actually completed a CTR process.

i got this from 2 sources and also my own test which I already mentioned in this thread.

I closely follow Josh Bachynski (his youtube channel) and also Ted Kubaitis (CORA developer). Ted in particular has provided facts on how much information your browser sends back to google (if the search started from google). Josh has done single variable testing where he has showed that the faster your audience takes action on your site, you get a better result in serp. a user who has to go through multiple pages before he takes action tells google that your site was not convincing enough to get the user to take quick action.
 
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fb3003 said:
the same logic/code/model/algrothym they use to figure out dwell time, ctr, is used to see if you have actually completed a CTR process.

i got this from 2 sources and also my own test which I already mentioned in this thread.

I closely follow Josh Bachynski (his youtube channel) and also Ted Kubaitis (CORA developer). Ted in particular has provided facts on how much information your browser sends back to google (if the search started from google). Josh has done single variable testing where he has showed that the faster your audience takes action on your site, you get a better result in serp. a user who has to go through multiple pages before he takes action tells google that your site was not convincing enough to get the user to take quick action.
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Is clicking a link to another site considered as an action?
 
look_nohat said:
Is clicking a link to another site considered as an action?
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no - that is a bounce!!!! you dont want that!!!!!!!!

you want your user to enter at minimum 1 bit of information and complete a Call to action process
 
fb3003 said:
no - that is a bounce!!!! you dont want that!!!!!!!!

you want your user to enter at minimum 1 bit of information and complete a Call to action process
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Let's say we want to rank an affiliate review page, that most likely the main goal of it is bring visitors to the product/sales page.
Any idea what kind of CTA we can put on the page to get user information and complete a Call to action process?

I'm thinking about an optin box for this, but mostly the optin rate is low for this kind of page, so it won't help so much.
The comment box is also the same, people just want a review to convince them, after that they go to buy the product (or not).
So there you go, a page with less interaction with the user (means hard to rank with this CTR approach).
 
look_nohat said:
Let's say we want to rank an affiliate review page, that most likely the main goal of it is bring visitors to the product/sales page.
Any idea what kind of CTA we can put on the page to get user information and complete a Call to action process?

I'm thinking about an optin box for this, but mostly the optin rate is low for this kind of page, so it won't help so much.
The comment box is also the same, people just want a review to convince them, after that they go to buy the product (or not).
So there you go, a page with less interaction with the user (means hard to rank with this CTR approach).
Click to expand...


i suggest to see what the top affiliate site are doing and copy their model.... take a look at the most competitive niches and you will figure it out:

for example: best laptop for college; best laptop bag, etc.
 
Interesting stuff guys. Appreciate the input I was honestly just expecting a bunch of 'this doesn't work'.

I haven't been tracking this site for a few months so I wish I'd seen how much variation we had before. We briefly jumped 5 spots into page #1 for one term yesterday but I don't know how much variance it usually has.

I'll add some stuff tomorrow to interact with the site more. I know Chrome sends some data out but I don't know if it's specifically looking for a form post or what. In theory, leaving a comment or something would trigger that without having to add a fake lead gen form.
 
SEOMadHatter said:
Interesting stuff guys. Appreciate the input I was honestly just expecting a bunch of 'this doesn't work'.

I haven't been tracking this site for a few months so I wish I'd seen how much variation we had before. We briefly jumped 5 spots into page #1 for one term yesterday but I don't know how much variance it usually has.

I'll add some stuff tomorrow to interact with the site more. I know Chrome sends some data out but I don't know if it's specifically looking for a form post or what. In theory, leaving a comment or something would trigger that without having to add a fake lead gen form.
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If it does in any way correlate to GA, then you could just send an event. In Ga, a user counts as a bounce if they do not navigate past the landing page OR trigger an event, so you could trigger an event on any click for that matter, or try your fake lead gen form to post as an event in addition of seeing if Google captures the form fill for their metrics. Now, I do not know to which extent they grab data with just chrome if you are not running GA or Tag Manager, but with those 2 on they can track all of that for sure, but so could you trigger it based on a simple click and have it work in your favor.
 
Hmm, interesting point.

I don't have GA on this domain. This might require a split test with two sites - one with and one without to see if they respond differently.
 
SEOMadHatter said:
Hmm, interesting point.

I don't have GA on this domain. This might require a split test with two sites - one with and one without to see if they respond differently.
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having GA and not having it, makes no impact on serp. i have tested this so have others. in fact, many top sites that rank #1 for their keywords do not have GA.
 
fb3003 said:
having GA and not having it, makes no impact on serp. i have tested this so have others. in fact, many top sites that rank #1 for their keywords do not have GA.
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Using GA in this case, is for not ranking purpose, instead the most feasible way to know if google track & record any user action/interaction with the page.

Just My 2 cents.
 
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Just a quick update to finish the week.

Out of the half dozen or so keywords, two or three have some improvement but nothing major. Still not sure if this was related or just down to general variance. I'll be making some tweaks to improve the onsite activity at some point in the next few days and other than that - just keep it running.

fb3003 said:
having GA and not having it, makes no impact on serp. i have tested this so have others. in fact, many top sites that rank #1 for their keywords do not have GA.
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Oh absolutely. I haven’t used GA for an SEO project in years.

But I do wonder if inflating the CTR and on-site metrics are influenced differently if you have GA or not.
 
Just a quick update this morning.

Again - I wasn't tracking this site before so a little shift around might be normal but 4/5 keywords have shown improvement now which is a pretty good sign.
 
Another quick update to this one.

I still haven't had the time to add form actions or increase the onsite actions in general as I'd planned but we're seeing green across the board. Consistent upward movements so far. Still, very early days to really say for sure if this is really doing anything but it's looking good.

Even if this did require a constant flow of increased CTR it's still an interesting result because it takes a lot less resources to increase those ranks than I'll get for the extra traffic.
 
SEOMadHatter said:
Another quick update to this one.

I still haven't had the time to add form actions or increase the onsite actions in general as I'd planned but we're seeing green across the board. Consistent upward movements so far. Still, very early days to really say for sure if this is really doing anything but it's looking good.

Even if this did require a constant flow of increased CTR it's still an interesting result because it takes a lot less resources to increase those ranks than I'll get for the extra traffic.
Click to expand...
Great. Keep us updated.
 
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