'Net Features : report

Journey to the Top of the SERPs

Michael Garrity — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered why everyone seems to make such a big deal out of search engine optimization (SEO) and reaching that coveted top spot in the search engine results pages (SERPs)?

Well then, new data from Compete may just enlighten you, as a recent study of tens of millions of consumer-generated SERPs from Q4 of 2011 shows us just how massive the difference between a first and second place listing can be to a website.

According to the data, approximately 85 percent of all the listings shown are organic, with 15 percent appearing as paid search listings; they also found that 55 percent of all SERPs have ads.

But the more telling information comes from looking at the clicks on organic results. Compete says that 53 percent of those clicks go to the top organic listing, and the number decreases significantly from there. The second link gets 15 percent of the clicks, while the third gets nine percent, the fourth sees six percent and the fifth is clicked on just four percent of the time.

Being on top is also beneficial for paid listings, as well, though having the number one spot in the ad block is less important than simply appearing in the block at the top of the page. The study shows that about 61 percent of paid search ads show up on the right-hand sidebar, but they only account for 13 percent of the paid search clicks with the top listing getting just four percent of all paid search clicks. In contrast, the third listing in the top ad block receives around nine percent of all paid search clicks; in fact, the ads in the top block see an impressive 59 percent of all the paid clicks.

The report also shows that around 24 percent of the ads on a SERP appear at the top and make up an impressive 85 percent of the clicks, while 15 percent of them appear at the bottom of the page and get a paltry two percent of the clicks.

In other words, this report wants you to know that it pays off (big time) to invest in getting your site at the top of the SERPs. But as we all know, that's easier said than done.

Just a few weeks ago, Google released a list of 65 new changes to its search engine algorithm from August and September, many of which may have direct implications for how websites and pages will be able to move up in the SERPs. Here's a look at six of the most important updates; webmasters and SEOs take note.

The Role of Authority

One of the updates from August focuses on page quality and intends to help searchers find "more high-quality content" from sources that the search engine trusts. This means that building that kind of trust is crucial to improving your search ranking. You can do this by receiving (and giving) links from trusted and authoritative sites, creating a sitemap, lowering your bounce rate and not "over-optimizing" your content.

Matters of Location

Two updates now look more at location to determine a site's place in the SERPs. The first now determines relevancy of pages for queries containing locations, and the other "nearby" change improves the precision and coverage of relevant local Web results, helping it better identify results that are localized for each user (and ranks them appropriately). To better find these local, relevant searchers, optimize your site for local search by registering with a search engine's local business registry, getting links from local directories, developing location-specific landing pages and adding geographic keywords into landing page content, <h1> and <h2> tags and metadata.

The Return of Keyword Density

The changes also included an update to term-proximity scoring, which means it would behoove you to improve the keyword density on your site. You can do this by inserting keywords into page titles, headlines, ALT text, page URLs, rich footers and, of course, your copy.

The Importance of Freshness

Being fresh is crucial, and the last two months saw a number of changes aimed at rewarding sites with fresh content. Now, Google will apply a more granular function based on document age, and also seeks out and favors the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant to a search query. So make sure you're continually adding fresh content to your site, and if you're busy schedule makes that difficult, don't be afraid to ask for guest contributors or even press releases that you can publish. Anything to keep your site from just sitting there and getting stale.

Title Tags in Focus

It's difficult for Google to generate preview snippets for pages that it does not crawl because of robots.txt, so now a replacement snippet will be included that explains that there is no preview because of robots.txt. To prevent this, include titles and descriptions in the metadata of your Web pages.

Universal Intent

In addition to all of this, Google can now show improved Universal Search results through a better understanding of when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.

Take these key updates into consideration as you continue to optimize your site for the search engines (and maybe take a look at the other 59 changes, as well), and before you know it, you'll be movin' on up the SERPs.

Mobile Traffic Declines in July (And More Statistics)

Michael Garrity — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:30:00 GMT

Affiliate Window, one of the United Kingdom’s leading performance marketing networks, has unleashed upon the world its July report concerning mobile and m-commerce statistics.

Most curiously, the company found that the share of Web traffic through mobile devices actually dropped from over 12 percent in June to making up around just nine percent of total traffic in July. This isn’t terribly peculiar, as May saw a slight decrease, as well, following month-by-month increases for the first four months of the year.

On the upside, however, the volume of mobile clicks actually increased. And not only that, but the share of sales through mobile devices also rose, finally crossing the nine percent threshold at 9.42 percent. Ultimately, this figure, coupled with the drop in traffic, seems to show a closer alignment between mobile conversion rates and those of their desktop counterparts, as mobile conversion rates improved throughout July, increasing to 3.14 percent.

The report also breaks down mobile and m-commerce statistics by mobile device. It shouldn’t really be a surprise that Apple is (still) leading the pack, with the iPhone driving 38 percent of all mobile traffic by the end of the month. However, it’s not all sunshine for the brand, as iPad traffic actually ended up dropping below 40 percent. On the other hand, iPad sales reached a high of 63 percent of all mobile sales by the end of the month, and the iPhone ended up accounting for 24.87 percent.

Android devices saw traffic increases in July, with the number resting between 18 and 19 percent, up from June’s 17.5 percent. BlackBerry and “Other” devices both decreased, driving 1.5 and two percent of July’s mobile traffic, respectively. In terms of sales, Android saw another increase, ranging between 11.5 and 13 percent throughout the four weeks of July, while BlackBerry and “Other” devices both stayed below two percent.

From a year-to-date perspective, iPads have driven 57 percent of all mobile sales, with iPhones coming in second at 27 percent, and followed by Android (11 percent), BlackBerry (3 percent) and other devices (2 percent). Adding to this, Affiliate Window found that the iPhone, Android and “Other” devices allow showed an improvement in conversion rates in July; in fact, they were all almost identical at around 2.1 percent.

I think it’s fair to say that if you take anything away from this report, it’s not to put too much stock in the future of BlackBerry.

Report Studies User Experience of Financial Websites

Michael Garrity — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Web-based usability testing tool Usabilla recently conducted a study on the user experience, as well as usability similarities and differences among some of the largest retail banking websites in countries around the world, including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. Though it is focused on sites in the financial sector, many of the takeaways from the study provide insights that can be used to help websites in any industry.

Among the banks included in the report are Bank of America, Barclays, Chase, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Wells Fargo.

In the study, 400 participants were asked to perform simple, everyday tasks on these various websites and then provide feedback about their experiences. They were asked various questions, such as which aspects of the sites made them trust the banks, where they had to click to get information about credit cards, where they had to click to find information about how to meet with someone from their nearest branch of the bank, where to click if they have had a card stolen and what they would change or improve about each site.

Usabilla took the data from this report and gave each site a mean score based on accuracy and the time it took users to locate important information on the site. From there, each site was ranked from best to worst based on its overall performance.

Some of the most important findings from the study include the following:

- Often, many of these sites have a divide between a user's priorities and the priorities of the banks. Most of the "information is often based not on the most frequent actions a user takes . . . but on the services the bank wants to sell."

- A user's trust in a website is based largely on visual factors. Pages that display a padlock icon by their login and sign-in sections are often much more trusted than those who don't. Also, if they have clear banners and links that make reference to their security measures or programs, they appear more trustworthy; on the other hand, sites with many ads and/or offers appear less trustworthy.

- Most banks performed poorly when it came to offering a "Lost Credit Card" button by failing to place one somewhere that was easy for users to access. Many of the participants in the study said that "the experience of losing a credit card could be much less stressful" if banks were to make this button simpler to find on their websites.

- The sites with the cleanest designs on their credit card pages performed the best in the survey, with all participants agreeing that too much information made it difficult to find desired content.

"The retail banking sector occupies a critical corner on the Internet, and consumers place their financial livelihood in these companies every day," says Paul Veugen, Usabilla Founder and CEO. "We decided to test and highlight these leading retail banking websites due to the level of trust that consumers place in them combined with the intrinsic customer-centric nature of the banking sector."

Of course, it should go without saying that much of the information gleaned from this study can be worthwhile for any website. For instance, a common issue on many webpages is that businesses often don't adapt fast enough to meet user needs or wants, and recent trends on many sites are swinging towards customization for users. Likewise, it has long been known that the more cluttered a page is, the less usable it will be for people visiting the site.

Thus, it is good for website owners and designers to pay attention to these kinds of reports because, if nothing else, they show that even major companies can still make mistakes on the Web. The major findings of the study, when broken down to their essentials, are all about having a clean and easy-to-follow design and providing relevant content to users. I think that those concerns should be contemplated by any website.