16 replies to this topic

[Cosita]

I've noticed that only keywords that appear on the first page of the SEs get hits. If my sites fall to the second or third page, they get no hits at all.

Does anyone else experience this?

[ewc21]

Hi Cosita. I'd say good but not good enough. But the fact that it is already ranked around third to fourth pages shows it has the ability to go up further. Indeed your observation is common, that when your site is listed beyond page 3, it hardly gets any visibility to most online searchers who, by nature look at the first two or three pages.

You can always go up with that ranking already creeping towards first page.

[rohgan03]

It depends on how popular the keyword is. For instance if you rank on page for something like "cars" ...you would get loads of traffic.

Ingeneral yes it does taper off as you keep going deepr....try and build your raknings for multiple keywords...that would get you much more traffic than chasing to be #1 for a particular keyword

[hooperman]

I think it might also depend on what the user is searching for. For example, if I'm searching for some kind of 'reference material' (e.g. fireworks tutorials) I'm prepared to look at the first 10 pages and more, but if I'm looking for a cheap holiday I won't go that far.

[dmcconkey]

(e.g. fireworks tutorials)

You're not anywhere near my house, are you Hooperman?

Seriously, though. I personally almost never go beyond two SERPs when looking for something. If I can't find what I want in the top 20, I change my search term. If I look at my logs, I see similar results to yours. Top 10 terms get good referals. Top 20 get some. Beyond that it's nearly nill.

I'd much rather score top ten in a less competitive term than 28th for a popular term. Why would anyone go to my 28th ranked link? Did they really not find what they want in the first 27?

-Dan

[Randy]

My approach is a simple one...

My goal is Top 10. If I'm not in the Top 10 then I still have work to do, because I'm missing potential good quality traffic by being on page 2 or 3.

[oneofthe3lions]

Yes.. agree with Randy.. Except that I always aim top 3 as much as possible.. 90% of allll clicks are top 3 serp results

[hooperman]

I'm outside your house right now dmcconkey, where do you want me to put it?

I know that some sites that would be really useful to me won't rank so well, so I'm prepared to search (at length) for them. For instance, I'm searching for those darned fireworks turorials in google.com.br and I don't speak a word. But I know, most searches probably won't be like this one.

Forgot what the point was...

.. beyond my grasp probably.

[energybalance]

I have a client that says anything lower than page 1 or top ten... useless!

I have him around the position 8 and 9 for most days which is good

I presume very few users do the google customisation thing and make the first page consist of the top 50 or even top 100 sites.. would that be correct?

[Raphael]

I would presume so, eb. Most users don't even know how to customize their desktop, much less their google preferences.

[Jill]

I have him around the position 8 and 9 for most days which is good

For what? One phrase?

The problem with even looking at rankings is that it tells so little of the story.

For instance, I was just looking at my stats for this site (the entire High Rankings® site). Although my greatest number of visitors for a single keyword phrase (search engine optimization) is very good because I'm number 2 in Google for it, it still only makes up 8.33% of all the keyword search visitors to the site.

Nearly 83% of the visitors to the site through keyword searches come from other phrases all together. In fact, in just the past week, there were over 5000 other phrases that were used to find this site!

I assume that this site is probably ranking highly for those 5000+ phrases, but quite frankly, I don't really care. I am more interested in what they did when they got to my site.

As it turns out, the phrase search engine optimization is not all that great of a converter anyway. Although it does lead to a few request for information forms being filled out, percentage-wise, it's nothing to write home about.

A better converter are phrases having to do with things like "seo forum" and those types of phrases. Those particular ones convert very well in terms of forum registrations.

Obviously, different keyword phrases convert for different things, just as they're supposed to.

But this is why we so often talk about not worrying about rankings and instead looking at your more important stats. When you really analyze them with a good tool such as Google's new analytics tool, or Clicktracks, you can't help but not be interested in rankings because it's clear as a bell that rankings aren't what we need to look at.

[Randy]

Wanna know about the only time I check rankings?

When I see some new phrase I never optimized for show up in my conversion stats. That's right, a phrase that actually converted into a customer.

If it's something I didn't really optimize for I'm always curious to see what page of my site ranks for these odd phrases, sort out where I rank for the phrase on each engine and think about ways I may be able to improve my ranking. Hey, if it converted once it's likely to convert again!

[Jill]

Yep, that's a great point, Randy. And that's exactly how one should be using their stats and their SEO. Obviously, we care about keywords and how we're using them on the page, and how to get more people to our site through the ones that convert.

So if you find some good ones, it's certainly a good idea to optimize for them. The fact that you already got them in on the phrase at least once, probably means it wouldn't be that hard to get more of them in.

Although many times you just luck out with some obscure phrase that only one person thought of. Still, there could be a bunch of very similar phrases that other people think of.

It's really interesting to see the multitude of ways people use phrases. They really do use very long phrases these days, judging by the stats I see.

[bims]

That's right, a phrase that actually converted into a customer. 

Hi Randy,

How does one track this? Even though my site is information based at the moment it won't be for mouch longer so some insight as to how to do this would be useful.

Thanks!

[Jill]

How does one track this?

Please see our "log file analysis and measuring ROI" forum. You need the right software.