Conversion Rate Boost for Top Ranking Keywords
Well, I have been playing with the new version of Webmaster Tools and it’s really something.
The three new pieces of information that are really exciting to me are the number of impressions for a keyword; the average rank for the keyword and the clickthrough rate for a keyword – in a given period.
This is exciting stuff.
The ranking/clickthrough/impressions data is especially useful to me when I have a site under test because say I have a microniche site with a theme keyword ranking average position 4 in a month, with 500 impressions in a month and say 50 clicks. In theory, once I get to know the average conversion rate for a targeted site at a given ranking, I could extrapolate the data to forecast with some accuracy what I can expect to achieve when the site gets to no. 1.
And herein lies the first eye-opener!
Aside from any inaccuracy with the “impressions” number, and there seems to be some, the big revelation is the conversion percentages. To date I have been using the old AOL table from 2006 to determine what percentage of traffic a site could expect to receive at no.1, no.2 etc.:
| Position | % of clicks |
| 1 | 42.1 |
| 2 | 11.9 |
| 3 | 8.5 |
| 4 | 6.1 |
| 5 | 4.9 |
| 6 | 4.1 |
| 7 | 3.4 |
| 8 | 3.0 |
| 9 | 2.8 |
| 10 | 3.0 |
Now, though, judging by what I see in Webmaster Tools for my sites, it looks as if this old data, based on averages for all sites whether targeted to a keyword or not, is really not appropriate when it comes to forecasting the clickthrough percentage at a given ranking for targeted, focussed, Thirty-Day-Challenge-Style microniche sites. Recent examples from my stats seem to confirm an example in a new training video on this subject on Thirty Day Challenge Plus, which I cannot quote, but if I take an aggregate from all the data so far I get these very approximate expected conversion rates:
| Position | % of clicks |
| 1 | 80 |
| 2 | 45 |
| 3 | 30 |
| 4 | 25 |
OK so it’s early days, and these results are VERY ROUGH and based on a TINY sample, but this looks very exciting. On the face of it, this means that I can expect much higher conversions from targeted niche sites than the old table led me to believe.
Note how the total is way over 100%. This is likely because the highly relevant, targeted pages involved really do pull in the traffic far better than the global average page for that keyword – something that I, and many others, overlooked since that original table appeared in 2006.
If, through use of Google Webmaster Tools, we build up enough case history in the conversion rates at a given rank for targeted sites, this will lead to big changes in the assumptions we make. For example, at present the Market Samurai tool, which I love, applies a 42% multiplier to expected traffic to give “SEOT” which is expected traffic at number 1. This is in line with the 2006 AOL data. It will be interesting to see if the tool is changed in time to reflect what we will learn.
Please let me know your views on all this by leaving a comment below.
