Keyword research data reveals the SEO CTR rewards for top of SERP rankings in Google. Inform your SEO marketing strategy with the latest trends in 2024

You often hear company owners saying “I want to rank top” for their target keywords. Although this may be an unrealistic hope, they’re right to say this since they realize that claiming the top position in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) drives up your SEO click-through rate CTR like nothing else. October 2023 data from firstpage.com demonstrates that ranking #1 generates a typical CTR of 39.8%. That's more than double the CTR for 2nd position, 18.7%, and nearly 4x the CTR for 3rd position, 10.2%. You can see this example below for example search term 'customer data platform". While the top 3 positions carry double-digit click-through rates, these start fallling rapidly to…

Monitoring the right KPIs is the best way to avoid spending time and money on something that isn’t driving the expected profit

Is your SEO strategy effective enough? How can you ensure your efforts drive tangible results? What can you do to develop your website performance? Tracking the right performance metrics, you’ll be able to answer all these questions. KPIs work as a control system that lets you identify which tactics work and which don’t. What’s most important, monitoring the right KPIs is the best way to avoid spending time and money on something that isn’t driving the expected profit. [si_guide_block id="107298" title="Read our Business Membership resource – Big book of marketing KPI benchmarks" description="This handy guide will help you improve your return on marketing by applying thoughtful, targeted benchmarks and forecasting to your day-to-day marketing activities."/] In this article, I’ll highlight 10 critical indicators marketers should pay attention to.

1. Organic traffic

This KPI measures how…

Tracking all the usual metrics can help you measure SEO performance, but there are 3 other metrics you probably aren't tracking that could help make a big difference

SEO is all about generating organic traffic to a website and ensuring that the acquired organic traffic converts well. As an SEO professional, you're probably already be tracking a number of metrics, such as organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, keyword rankings, backlinks earned etc. But, there are three metrics that most SEOs aren’t tracking but they really should be. [si_guide_block id="87442" title="Check out our Quick Win – 3 killer techniques to boost SEO" description="Here's three simple methods to give your website a huge boost in Google rankings - helping you gain more traffic and grow your audience. Start making a difference today."/] Let’s learn what’s these three metrics are and how to track them:

1. Organic traffic 'quality'

Organic traffic quality is a better metric to track…

Learn how to estimate your share of search for different keywords using Google Search Console, and how to perform a gap analysis to find your SEO gaps

Making better use of organic search has become particularly important in the 2020 pandemic where many businesses don't have the budget available to put into Google Ads or social ads. The gap analysis technique we will explain in this article is powerful in identifying new opportunities to increase organic traffic. Since search engines first became popular, search engine marketing has offered a fantastic way for businesses to grow awareness and sales as people search for their products and services. What better point in time to reach your target audience if they have a defined need? This recent marketing channel benchmark from search analysis service Brightedge shows that across different B2B sectors, both organic and paid search are major traffic drivers. …

Managing all the data associated with SEO can be difficult, but Google Sheets can make it more manageable to handle and compare your data.

Managing SEO tasks requires you ti handle a lot of data. While most SEO tools obviously include their own analytics packages, it’s often awkward to gain a clear picture of your overall situation while jumping between these platforms. Enter Google Sheets.  If you didn’t know, Sheets is Google’s free cloud-based alternative to Excel. On top of easy collaboration, its main benefit for SEO professionals is direct integration with Google’s other tools. Chief among these are Keyword Planner and Search Console.  In this article, we’ll look at a number of ways you can leverage Google Sheets to manage your SEO tasks. This will include tricks to save time coordinating projects, as well as concrete ways you can find and leverage data to improve your search…

What percentage of searches are on organic vs paid results

Much of the insight into how consumers search is based on Google services like Keyword Planner and Search Console. Like all analytics, these are limited to quantitative data and don’t tell us much about the motivations for the behaviour. This research study considers different types of behaviour by reviewing eye-tracking for different search types on the ‘path to purchase’. It’s a UK study, similar to previous research from iProspect in the US that I reported on, but haven’t been repeated recently. [si_quick_block id="141561" title="How to conduct keyword analysis in Google Search Console" description="Utilize Google Search Console to carry out intent-driven keyword research analysis and find SEO opportunities. This Quick Win is perfect for anyone unfamiliar with Google Search Console or looking to refresh their knowledge of the platform."] Update: At the end of this post, I've added complementary, more recent research from Rand…

Measuring the ROI of your SEO campaign is a crucial part of analyzing your digital marketing strategy, and is undoubtedly the most significant indicator of campaign value. But how do you measure it?

As marketers, we all obsess over results. To know we’ve achieved successful results, we use a range of KPI’s and coincidentally, we obsess over them, too. Website traffic, click-through rates, conversions, search engine rankings - they’re all important, but there’s only one king of the KPIs and that’s ROI. This is because no other metric is truly able to assess whether the time and money invested in your marketing efforts have been worth the impact it’s had on your business. Essentially, we need to ensure nothing is going to waste. [si_guide_block id="134895" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – SEO report template" description="This SEO report template created in PowerPoint gives you a simple structure to follow when…

Positioning more than one type of content will divide your forces, reducing the effectiveness and confusing both Google and your users

Keyword cannibalization occurs when you're ranking for keywords with more than one URL on your website. Think of it like a chess game where you’re playing on both sides of the board. Positioning more than one type of content will divide your forces, reducing the effectiveness and confusing both Google and your users. User intent is the focus here, because whilst the keywords you want to rank for might be different, the search intent or "query" is the same. [si_guide_block id="5762" title="Download our Premium Resource – SEO gap analysis Excel spreadsheet" description="This spreadsheet will show you how to create a comprehensive target keyword report and review performance to identify new SEO and content marketing strategies."/]

Why do multiple pages compete?

Having different URLs compete for the same keywords is not unheard of. In…

We have explored the world of SEO custom alerts to make sure that key elements such as robots.txt, traffic and rankings are closely monitored

Have you ever spent time and effort on optimizing a website only to see all that hard work blown away in a blink of an eye? We have explored the world of SEO custom alerts to make sure that key elements such as robots.txt, traffic and rankings are closely monitored so you can track issues and fix them straight away. [si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download our Premium Resource – Successful SEO guide" description="Our comprehensive guide to Search Engine Optimisation best practices isn't just for SEOs, the clear explanations mean that it can be used by marketers to ask the right questions to boost their SEO."/] After a (bad) experience with a developer going rogue and disallowing an entire site overnight, I’ve been focusing on finding solutions to potentially avoid catastrophic issues like…

Position tracking for small businesses made easy through SEO tools

Search engine optimization (SEO): in this day and age, you're simply not going to get anywhere without it. No matter what line of work you're in, it's almost a guarantee that you're going to use the internet, and this fact has made it even more important to know how to use SEO to drive visitors to websites and front doors. Thankfully, because of how connectivity is so widespread, there's no dearth of tools to support the SEO efforts of business owners.

The features you need

Nowadays any small business or online agency can run their own SEO campaigns or take on projects on behalf of other companies. SEO has come a long way since the black-hat days of keyword stuffing, though; working your website up the search results ladder into that coveted top spot requires a steady hand on the tiller and…