What is the click through rate for your SEO results?
Click through rate of the SERP – Search Engine Results Page
We all want to be on the first page of Google, Bing or Yahoo for our chosen keywords, but even if we do get there, how likely are people to click on our results? Or in other words what is the click through rate of the search engine results page (SERP).
Use Web Master Tools
Actually you can get quite a good idea from Google’s Web Master Tools. Web Master Tools used to be more focused just on the technical side of indexing a site, but now it also gives some very useful information on keywords and shows the click through rates of your web pages on the Google SERP (read my short getting started guide to Web Master Tools).
Average SEO click through rates
I’ve got quite a number of sites linked to my Web Master Tools login and recently I took a look at the sorts of keywords that are more likely to work and also an average click through rate for some of the sites.
Longer keyword phrases bring best results
What I found was very interesting. Generally it is the longer keyword phrases that will bring the best results (often 5 words or more). Sometimes the click through rate for these was as much as 40% which is really a very good return from the search engines.
Business name phrases
Next is keywords relating to the business name. This has a click through rate of around 15% to 20%. The more generic sector related phrases (the ones everyone wants to be top for), are much lower at around 2% to 10%.
So the message here I think is make sure you come top for your company name (which should not be too difficult), and then develop pages with plenty of keyword rich text to get the longer keyword phrases.
