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What is better for long term growth, higher click through rate with lower impressions, or higher impressions with lower click through rate?
I’ve been working on a web app over the last year. The site is built in a way that all pages are built with indexing in mind using react-helmet to inject keywords, tags, metadata, etc. We’ve been live for 6 months or so with about 500 pages indexed, made up of our own content (product reviews and product info) as well as community created content and still have about 3500 pages that can be indexed with more being added every day. Our site offers live price tracking across most retailers, user reviews, long form reviews, product comparisons, stack-ranking items against each other and alternatives.
Because of all that we offer, we actually have a pretty high click through rate when we rank in top 10. A lot of people have been using the site to find products in the niche to purchase so will come directly to us to research products, then use our links to go to the retailer of their choice. On a normal day, we’re usually anywhere between 10-15% clickthrough rate. *But* a lot of that is people using google to come directly to our site. For example if we get 50 clicks on one day, 40 might be people just searching the name of our site (which is always going to have almost a 100% CTR because we rank #1) and 10 might be people searching, “UnknownBrandCo Toaster Reviews” or “Lowest UnknownBrandCo Toaster Prices” but all 10 clicks will come from pages being shown in <10 positions because the brand/product isn’t well known so there isn’t a lot of competition. On days where we’re getting 10-15% clickthrough rate, our impressions will be 300-500, but with average position will be low, like \~18.
However, recently, in the last week we’ve started getting random days where we get giant spikes in impressions. 2-3x our normal amount, but for the queries that are driving the most impressions, we’re sitting at position 80-100 and obviously not getting clicks from this. So to stick with the toaster example, it might be people just googling, “Best Toaster” which gets a ton of impressions, but we’re in position 100. On these days, we might have 1000 impressions, but our click through rate is now 3%. So while it might be a nice vanity metric (wooo line going up big today!!), I wonder if it’s bad in terms of growth since it really doesn’t drive us traffic or brand recognition.
My thinking is that, from Google’s perspective, high click through rate means high value. If they put us at 10 and a lot of people click and spend a few minutes on the site, then “They should rank higher, people like this a lot”. However if they put us at position 100 for a popular search query, we’re never going to get clicks (who goes back that far?) and then google will think, “Wow, this site must be shitty, 1000 impressions and no clicks?”
I realize that there is obviously more to the search/ranking algorithm, but I feel like getting 2-3x more impressions on one day with no additional clicks, only does harm, not good. Is that true?
I realize its kind of moot either way since I can’t really tell google “Rank us high or dont rank us at all” but I’m just curious.
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1 Reply
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Click through rate. That means higher average search result in the SERPS. You can grow impressions but bad quality content won’t magically get better.
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If you get a click you have a chance of capturing valuable data or acquiring a user/customer. An impression is the hope of a future return. Personally I’m a here and now kinda guy. I’ll take the click.
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