Sometimes folks do all the right things to get their sites into search engine result pages but they still don’t see search results. If you’re viewing your search results and growth in Google Analytics and you’re not seeing a lot of traffic – you may need to dig a little deeper.
Engaging a new visitor starts with the search engine results page. Are you in the search engine results page for keywords that will drive traffic? If you’re on the search engine results page, are people clicking through on those results to your site or blog?
You won’t find this information in your analytics package, but you will find it in Google Search Console (Oyang'anira Masamba a Bing doesn’t have this yet). Google Search Console provides you with a breakdown of search results you’re indexed in and your position… and then the actual results that folks are clicking through on.
If you find that you’re in a lot of search engine results but not getting clicked on, it’s something you should work on fixing by writing better page titles (or blog post titles) and a few compelling, keyword-rich sentences. Here are the search engine results for Geotag your Blog:
Notice how Problogger’s result is much more compelling? Everyone must be clicking through on his result… so I’ve got some modifications to do on mine. I’m going to try a new meta description:
A simple tool to geotag your web site, blog, or rss feed. Enter your address and we’ll generate the code to paste in your site, blog or RSS feed.
Hopefully, this minor edit will result in many more searchers clicking through on my site to Geotag your Blog than the competition!
I also found a lot of searches for tools to clean up your address or find a zip for an address so I added some verbiage to do that as well! We’ll watch and see what the results are in a couple of weeks. I resubmitted the site to Google to re-index now that I’ve modified the page.
If you started messing with your titles are you afraid you could use your rankings?
If no one is clicking, what good is a great rank?
I have never seen it where any website that I know of or track is ranked for
a major keyword and no one clicks on their link
That's intriguing – you must have some great content writers. We've got quite a few clients that we've walked through some advanced training on for increasing CTRs with more compelling post titles because their CTRs were so low on the SERPs. I would not say its common – but I have seen many examples of it. Enough to post about it :).
I appreciate the insight. I am definitely going to take a look at this
nkhani.
I believe little things like this is how websites separate themselves to be
successful online. I find too many people just know the ABC's because they
took a class and don't know how to compete against other websites who also
know the ABC's.