SEO – Beyond the Rankings

SEO is, by its very nature, about obtaining high rankings in the search engines for keywords relevant to a website’s product and service offerings. This is, however, only part of the story. There are a host of equally critical factors to consider after achieving rankings.

Click Through Rate

Depending on which set of figures you read, the click through rate (CTR) on search engine results pages for the first natural listing could be anything from 15% to 40%! Our own research in this area indicates that click through rate varies wildly too. Reaching number 1 for a big keyword is great – but then it’s about maximising the traffic that this generates.

If you’re number 1 for a keyword with, on average, 100,000 exact match UK searches a month, increasing your CTR from even 20 to 25% will increase visitor numbers from 20,000 a month to 25,000.

Conversion Rate

Whatever your goal is, whether it’s a sale or an enquiry, your conversion rate will be critical to ensuring the maximum ROI on your campaign.

Conversion rate can be improved in a number of ways, by addressing factors such as usability, messaging and trust.

Social Audience Building

If a user does not convert from visit to sale on their first visit, the hope Is that they come back again in the future and convert. And one way to encourage that is to make sure they remember you and are in some way ‘in touch.’ Encouraging users to follow you on Twitter or Facebook is a great way to do that and, as such, social buttons on your site can be very effective.

Social factors are also having an increasing impact on search engine results.