Ranking well in the Google SERPS isn’t the end all be all label for success when it comes to SEO. As an SEO Consultant, I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase “Just get me to a high position for this keyword, and I’ll be happy!” What does that high position mean for your keyword? How many click through visits are you getting from that Google SERP? Is that keyword even worth targeting?
A lot of the times, recommended keywords from the business owner aren’t worth targeting, the keyword research that is done will usually tell a different story, and will often shock the business owner who thought his keyword phrase was a sure hit.
What does a high ranking Google SERP mean though? Especially if you’re targeting the wrong keywords, it could mean nothing. Optify.com released a study on SERP’s and their click through rates that has become a sworn document of mine recently. This particular study breaks down each position on page one of the Google SERPS and estimates a percentage of click’s you’re going to received from position 1 through 10.
Not only does this provide a reasonable expectation on the work it will take to rank for a keyword, but will also help weed out the keywords that may be more trouble than they’re worth.
Google SERPS Click Through Chart
This kind of chart creates a very good estimate in an SEO’s mind about just how many clicks a particular keyword can expect when it rankings for a certain position.
Example: “Keyword Stuff” Has an average monthly search of 22,000. We can expect to rank at spot 4 after all the optimization we do to a web page. So looking at the chart, we can estimate that 6% of 22,000 would actually click through to your website. The equation would be .06 x 22,000 = 1320 total expected visits if we attained position 4 in the Google SERPS.
Breaking it down to the simplest form can really alert someone to the keywords that they want to show up for. If you’re looking at a keyword that has less than 200 visits average, are you really that excited to have any posting after the position 6 spot? If you held position 6, would you really be happy with 7.8 visits a month (.0399 x 200)?
It is true of course, that ranking for all of these keywords does build up to an ever increasing number, but you should be thinking bigger when it comes to main pages, while focusing on long-tail keywords for lesser pages of your website.