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I noticed a slight change in the reports that Google Webmaster shows for "Top Search Queries". They now show the impressions and click through for each position for each web page.
Why will this help? This new information shows the impressions, and click throughs for each of your pages on your most significant terms. You can see what pages have better metrics. I think Google also uses these performance metrics to determine who gets better SERPS.
Glad you brought this up. I posted the following on another board that I frequent, it unfortunately seems to be dieing a slow death. BTW, the phrase(s) I'm referencing are casino names. It's not a gambling-related board, so I don't bother to get into all that.
Quote:
I've been examining the new top search query data in Google's webmaster tools and it has led me to believe that I must be doing something wrong. Maybe, maybe not. For every X number of impressions it's showing for a particular keyword search where I rank very well, the CTR is very low -- 5% or less.
Example.
The top query for one of my sites is a three word phrase (those are the 3 words I'm targeting). I show up in the 3rd spot the majority of the time for this search (just behind the actual website I'm promoting). For the particular date range I'm looking at it's showing 320 impressions with only 22 clickthroughs, 7% (overall 480 impressions, 22 c/t, 5% -- the rest of the positions are <10).
When my result comes up it shows as (snippet is meta description):
Bobs Blue Widget
Bobs Blue Widget offers abc and xyz.
http://domain.com/directory/bobs-blue-widget.php
Three times the three word phrase shows, I'm the third result, yet I'm losing 93% of the searchers.
This particular section of this particular site is the producer of most of my income. Since I put these pages up years ago I've been very skittish about changing anything on them. I never did anything to try and get these pages to rank, they just did (as opposed to everything I try to desperately rank for and cant).
I just can't seem to grasp why I'm showing that many times, that high, and yet being overlooked over 90% of the time with all the keywords in place that the user is searching for. If I could make positive changes to influence a better CTR and not sacrifice my ranking then I would, but we know how changes go with the SEs, especially Google. Not quite sure how to move forward with this (I'm a statistics freak just for the record).
These changes are really too good,
i like it, google webmaster tool that shows impression is really too good
Newest feature by Google is clickthrough data on all of websites. It shows data on organic search traffic only. To find this data in your account, go to the “Your site on the web” tab and then click on “Top search queries.” This is a big help in optimizing title tags and meta descriptions for higher clickthrough rates.
I believe this information was already available in Google Analytics... since I always remember this metric being useful.
Having all these data can really help optimize pages for SEO and also consumer targeting.