No Comments An SEO Expert’s CTR Experiment

[This article was written in October of 2008, by Steve Wiideman. Many of the articles on this website were copied to a different different domain in 2009, which I was not able retract. This is the original version, which I've since then made even better. I hope you find it useful and that it helps your business.]

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the difference in clicks and impressions, where impressions are the number of times a search result page (often called SERPs) and clicks are number of actual clicks within that search result. Google won’t share with us other possible CTR factors, such as multiple clicks on the same listing within the same period of time, but we know the people at Google are PhD’s and have created an algorithm to detect patters of behavior.

A/B Testing is what we SEO Experts do contstantly. Sometimes these experiments result in the discovery of some extremely useful data, which can help us improve how we rank in the search engine results of Google and Bing. I recently ran a test on this blog to see how CTR influences search engine ranking and the results were incredible. Here’s how the experiment went down:

Wiideman’s Hypothesis

Working with a number of Fortune 500 organizations, and having spoke with several people at Google in 2005-2007, I learned that Google’s algorithm for organic search ranking is similar to it’s algorithm for paid search Quality Score. Therefore, we can assume that click-through rate (CTR) would be an important factor for both. If a listing on the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th page of Google’s search results received a higher volume of clicks than those on page 1 or within the top 3 search results, that listing would theoretically improve in ranking.

Wiideman’s Test

Here’s what I used to test the hypothesis on this blog in 2008: RSS feeds were used to for quick indexing in the search results, social bookmarking websites were used for 2nd/3rd page placement, and social networking websites were used to convince an audience to assist me test CTR. I used my LinkedIn account and asked people to click my listing on page 3.

Then I used my very-syndicated blog at the time (another domain taken from me in 2009), which was at the time optimized with a great permalink structure, unique hand-written titles, meta descriptions, and headings, and then I created the final post. Through blog and ping techniques, I was able to get my page indexed in about 15 minutes and I was on page 3 of Google.com’s search results for “Business.com Contest”.

Once my page was indexed, I used some basic social bookmarking tactics to create a few backlinks to the blog post, using a variation of “Business.com Contest” within the link text. This modification moved the listing to page 2 of Google within about 2 and half hours.

My network of associates in LinkedIn graciously assisted me by searching for “Business.com Contest” and choosing my organic listing from page 2 of Google’s search engine results. By 4pm of the following day the listing bounced around between the 1st and 10th position on the first page, varying by the geography of the searcher.

The Result of the Experiment

By 7:30pm on the second day, the page listing had disappeared from Google’s search results. I scratched my head for awhile to figure out what happened. The filtering of my page may have been due to a number of specific reasons, but based on the feedback I received from other SEO Experts, my assumption was that Google detected the number of users skipping the 1st page search results altogether and detected the pattern of behavior, which caused Google to immediately filter the listing out.

Many marketers who don’t abide by Google’s Terms and Conditions, often called “Black Hat SEO’s” use programs that emulate a web browser to try and fake CTR ratios by having robots do the clicking. Having my LinkedIn audience produce a similar behavior pattern is what most-likely flagged the listing resulting in the filtered search result.

The Lesson

When you get to the second or third page of Google, use other approved strategies to reach page one. For example, try to get other websites to link to your listing, share it on the social networks (especially Facebook and Twitter), but don’t try to “trick” Google with CTR patterns that too obvious.

That being said, Pontiac did something special for their Super Bowl advertisement in 2008. Essentially, they told their viewers to “Google Pontiac” as opposed to “visit www.pontiac.com”. Chris Boggs, wrote about it in February of 2008, and it’s definitely worth the read. The idea is that you get in the habit of telling your listeners, viewers, and readers to search for your brand as opposed to visiting your website. This will still improve your ranking, since Google will see people search specifically for your website, where thereby improves Google’s opinion of how important your website is (particularly if searchers use keywords in conjunction with your brand name).

Thanks for reading!