Wwohn.com : Do people click on your website in Google?

Do people click on your website in Google?

Posted by Oeroek in april 2nd, 2008

Having a top 10 position in Google can be fantastic. Especially if people also click on the link to your site. Luckily, Google has a tool to determine if people visit your site if the site shows up in their search results.

Below I describe why a top 10 ranking alone is not sufficient. Subsequently I show how to measure click through rate and how to influence this.

What should be added to a top 10 Google rating

Higher positions in Google generally get more clicks. But does your site get all the clicks it deserves?

Visitors that search in Google can see your title, description and URL to determine if they are going to proceed to your site. Look for example at the following search results and how the title and description influences your perception.

Change the title and description?

Title and description can be changed on your own site and will in principle be used by Google.

Title

The title is a HTML tag that is used by Google. You will also see the title in the left upper corner of your browser. If you open your HTML template it looks as follows.

<title>title of your website</title>

If you spot this line, change it. If it is missing, add it to your HTML and adjust it.

Try to have a different title on all pages. Many software products have the possibility to adjust the title dynamically and have it show the title of the post or content on that page.

For example in Wordpress, you can add the title of your post into the HTML tag.

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Try to minimize the title to less than 60 characters.

Description

Google uses the meta tag description to present a short summary in their search results. Look in your HTML for the following line:

<meta name="description" content="Your description“>

Try to add a different description on all pages.

Google Webmaster tool: Evaluate the title and description

If you end up in a good spot in the Google search results it is quality knowledge to know if people click on your link. You can use the Google webmaster tools for this purpose.

First sign up and verify your website. After you have signed in, go to statistics and look for the overview of top 20 search results. I can only open the Dutch version from which I have taken a screenshot.

On the left side you will see part of the top 20 keywords for which your website is shown in the search results. The right side shows the top 20 keywords on which your visitors have clicked and visited your website. You can now see for which keywords your site is shown in Google and on what keywords visitors click to your website.

As an example, you will note that the keyword “captcha alternatives” is shown in the top 2 of both lists and leads to my article about alternatives for a captcha. This is a good result.

The keyword “pound key” is shown a lot of times but for some reason it does not pop up in the list of clicks. This is bad since I would expect the top 20 of keywords on the left also show up in the diagram to the right. From Google I get the following result on the word “pound key”.

Not only did I misspell the word “pound” in the URL, I know note that I forgot to make an unique description for this page. So the description shown by Google is some random line of text from the article. There is obviously room for improvement here.

Concluding

Please open up this overview and look at the top 20 in both lists. Watch for keywords that are listed in the search results but do not lead to visitors. Go to Google and search these keywords. Make sure that you have done everything to attract those visitors and adjust the title and description if necessary.

I am wondering how many people don’t even have unique descriptions and titles.

Popularity: 25% [?]

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