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Search Engine Ranking and Progress Signals


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When I have time, I read up on SEO and how to apply it to my website. As with any shop owner, I come across something that sparks my curiosity. This time it's an article from Kissmetrics named "Search Engine Ranking Is Not The Point - Check These Progress Signals Instead". Oftentimes I tend to think too much about simple things. 

To me, the article is straightforward until I get to the beginning part of the Actions You Should Take section. It says what to do but not how to do it. So I come to the OSC community for advice and clarity. Others and myself could benefit from the voices of authority here. Two main things that I couldn't grasp were Improve Page Relevancy and Improve page engagement and all relevancy signals. The author didn't offer much help there. It could be another blog post indeed.

@Jack_mcs @Dan Cole @Hotclutch @MrPhil @frankl and whomever wants to help us, please read the above linked article and give us whatever you want to contribute. @burt I know you'll take advantage of opportunity to move OSC forward so hopefully this will render another healthy discussion. 

Thank you all for your spare time.

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If members and anyone who wants to have an input in the conversation can come up with a common sense approach and consensus on the correct way forward...I'm all ears for inclusing into the Core or making Modules/Hooks etc.

 

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@burt Hopefully this topic will catch some traction soon. Maybe the article and community participation together can solve issues such as high impressions/low CTR the OSC way. Most ecommerce platforms and WordPress have modules/plug-ins available to help with such deficiencies. 

I know @Jack_mcs Header Tags SEO module helps a lot. He's always available to help. Maybe he can give some tips on how to adjust HT SEO to help with the issues outlined in the article if we ask him nicely. Specifically the section I pointed out.

I was hoping other shop owners would chime in with best practices, tips or ideas.

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I think the "Page Relevancy" he mentions refers to making the page match what is being targeted. For example (probably not a very good one), let's say you sell widgets of all colors but you find that most people like red widgets. So you setup your title and tags to target "red widgets" but the actual page deals with all widgets. So the page is not specially about red widgets and visitors may click away when they don't immediately find the color they want. So by having a page dedicated to each color, you would increase their relevance for their keyword.

For "engagement"  there is a link at the bottom to a page that explains that. It appears he is referring to how to get people to the site. One of the recent changes has to do with reviews. Google is highlighting them more now and using them for ranking. A member recently mentioned that Gary has a review addon that make a big improvement for her site. I am not familiar with it so he would need to offer details on that. There is also an addon - Review Requests - that sends automatic review requests. It also seems to work quite well.

As for the author saying position is not important, I disagree, or maybe I miss the point. Google has stated before that links in the top 20 positions get the vast majority of clicks. I think most searchers do not realize that search results can be influenced by the site. So when they see a site ranked number 1 it means, to them, that that site is better than the rest and they click on it first. Whether they purchase anything once on the site is a different matter but being ranked high increases the chances that they will.

So I think that article makes some good points. I caution against relying on the ranking it lists since the ones for my site are almost never close. Also, google requires a link for each time of url - http:, https:, http://www, https://www - that your site uses. With the recent push of shop owners converting to full ssl, they don't realize that they may to add this to WMT.

 

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Every idea on how to see and compare data is helpful.  For me, certain items are searched far more during some seasons and that affects impressions.  Also, holidays like the recent weekend in the US lowers the amount of searching done.  Actually, the month of May sucks for me and June isn't stellar.  So, if you're tweaking things, it's important to consider things like that.  We all sell a variety of things and the metrics to shoot far vary with that.  I'm not always sure what is really good on some metrics.  With a niche market I think it's harder to figure some of this out.  A lot of big companies are competing with me now with Adwords.

Since we're all in sales, we look at things differently from people just trying to get traffic.  I've used Adwords since 2003 with varying success.  In recent conversations with Adwords reps I realized they don't fully comprehend our world.  For me, there is a spot where my spending gets the best ROI and beyond that is wasteful.  That also varies on the time of year.  Adwords does have some great tools for looking at search rankings on different devices in different locations.  They also have table data on how you compare to others in your keywords.

I'm not really a dog.

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5 hours ago, Jack_mcs said:

I think the "Page Relevancy" he mentions refers to making the page match what is being targeted. For example (probably not a very good one), let's say you sell widgets of all colors but you find that most people like red widgets. So you setup your title and tags to target "red widgets" but the actual page deals with all widgets. So the page is not specially about red widgets and visitors may click away when they don't immediately find the color they want. So by having a page dedicated to each color, you would increase their relevance for their keyword.

For "engagement"  there is a link at the bottom to a page that explains that. It appears he is referring to how to get people to the site. One of the recent changes has to do with reviews. Google is highlighting them more now and using them for ranking. A member recently mentioned that Gary has a review addon that make a big improvement for her site. I am not familiar with it so he would need to offer details on that. There is also an addon - Review Requests - that sends automatic review requests. It also seems to work quite well.

As for the author saying position is not important, I disagree, or maybe I miss the point. Google has stated before that links in the top 20 positions get the vast majority of clicks. I think most searchers do not realize that search results can be influenced by the site. So when they see a site ranked number 1 it means, to them, that that site is better than the rest and they click on it first. Whether they purchase anything once on the site is a different matter but being ranked high increases the chances that they will.

So I think that article makes some good points. I caution against relying on the ranking it lists since the ones for my site are almost never close. Also, google requires a link for each time of url - http:, https:, http://www, https://www - that your site uses. With the recent push of shop owners converting to full ssl, they don't realize that they may to add this to WMT.

 

@Jack_mcs thanks for some clarity. I can't seem to locate the link about engagement you mentioned. I agree, page rank or search position does matter. How does the searcher find your listing beyond page 5? 

I have issues with high impression/low CTR. On pages that are clicked, the CTR is actually pretty good. For example, in one day a page that's clicked may have 10 impressions and 4 clicks. However, pages that have 50 impressions won't have any clicks! I'm guessing that's due to how I write the meta descriptions.

Another issue is low position/high impressions. I have no clue about that one.

I think my real issue, from a novice's point of view, is I don't quite understand how to target keywords and long-tail keywords. It's not rocket science but it is a science.

Thanks Jack

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4 hours ago, John W said:

Every idea on how to see and compare data is helpful.  For me, certain items are searched far more during some seasons and that affects impressions.  Also, holidays like the recent weekend in the US lowers the amount of searching done.  Actually, the month of May sucks for me and June isn't stellar.  So, if you're tweaking things, it's important to consider things like that.  We all sell a variety of things and the metrics to shoot far vary with that.  I'm not always sure what is really good on some metrics.  With a niche market I think it's harder to figure some of this out.  A lot of big companies are competing with me now with Adwords.

Since we're all in sales, we look at things differently from people just trying to get traffic.  I've used Adwords since 2003 with varying success.  In recent conversations with Adwords reps I realized they don't fully comprehend our world.  For me, there is a spot where my spending gets the best ROI and beyond that is wasteful.  That also varies on the time of year.  Adwords does have some great tools for looking at search rankings on different devices in different locations.  They also have table data on how you compare to others in your keywords.

@John W If I follow you correctly, I believe you're talking about relevance. With Adwords relevance and keywords are the key in regards to ranking.

I'm struggling with relevance regarding organic serps. My wish is to maintain high impressions and reap good CTR as a result. So it's safe to say I need to get my keyword research and application skills up to par. I look at data in Google WMT daily and try my best to decipher it.

Thanks John

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One thing I see from the SEO article is the author is trying to sell Ignitor.  He has a bunch of articles to point to that.  Still he has some good points. 

There is a lot to pour over but Google Analytics can also help you quite a bit because you can set up Ecommerce factors and see where you get your sales from down to the invoice number.  If you haven't set up Analytics, get started with that too because it's free.  There's a module now in OSC, so it's easier than ever.

For impressions, the key is being on the first page, but high impressions come with keywords that are searched more.  Some of my stuff is obscure, so not searched much, but I still get sales when it is searched.  If someone searches a term but you are on the second page and they don't go to the second page you don't get the impression.  But, on the first page you will.  The WMT report he talks about is pretty cool and can show a lot of info, and can do individual keywords or phrases too.  Find a product that's searched a lot on your report and look at it over time.  You'll see when your ranking goes up you probably have more click through too.  One thing is you need to highlight "search type" if you have images showing up.  I have unique images and so that skews the ranking on the main report.  If you search "cedar roses" I have some of the first images, so that skews my ranking on that phrase.  You really want web searches, and on some phrases, mine changes a lot. 

I used to rank number 2 on Google and have had some problems this year, but I'm back on the first page and working on that.  One key thing is getting new products and getting reviews.  I'm using Gary's review request and that is helping on some products. 

The cool thing about Adwords is you can change your bid to drive your positon, but making a better ad is time well spent and can help your ad rank well.  It will show you a score up to 10/10 in Adwords on different keywords.

Honestly, a lot of this is overwhelming, so I try to take it on in bits. So many thoughts came to me as I wrote this, so I hope it makes sense.

I'm not really a dog.

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@John W I researched Ignitur and it appears to be an Internet marketing firm. So maybe that gives the author some authority in the field.

I'm not using adwords at the moment but I know the same practices can be applied to organic seo. I start these discussions hoping myself and others who are struggling with seo can benefit. Also, I hope coders like @burt and @Jack_mcs could develop modules to bring us all forward.

Thanks for your time and comments. Please continue. 

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