Results on the first page of Google depend almost exclusively on CTR and bounce rate
In this article, I will present the bold thesis that Google’s TOP 10 results no longer depend more on links or other signals. These results depend mainly on how Google users respond to them.
First of all, it is simply logical. Even without any proof, it is easy to believe something like this, because it makes sense. To begin with, let’s try to prove it by the simplest possible method, which is to try to disprove my claim.
Iron logic
Suppose we have site A and site B. To site A comes a million super relevant links from strong sites. To page B comes 10 good links from normal pages. The pages are optimized for the same keyword. It is clear that at first page A will position better. With a million links, it will probably even land in first place. Page B, on the other hand, caught the honorable 9th place, because the keyword is not so difficult and 9 links were enough. However, site A has a problem. Page A doesn’t contain useful information for the user who searched for the keyword. The user enters the site, looks around for a few seconds, doesn’t find a solution to his problem, leaves the site and returns to Google looking further. He browses a few more pages like this and arrives at result nine, which is our page B. Site B is super informative. The user goes to the site, stays on it for a few minutes, because the information on it is very, very helpful. Even groundbreaking for his life. Changing his previous paradigms and opening up new avenues of thought previously unknown to him. The user is overjoyed. He has learned everything he wanted to learn. Thanks to our little “B” website. Our user shuts down the browser, closes the computer and goes to sleep, never to return to Google.
And here the question arises: what is the point for Google in showing page A over page B? Well, none. Despite better conventional statistics, absolutely none.
The iron logic continues
Google has information about which result the user clicked on and whether that result “satisfied a need” for the user. If a person clicked on a link in the serps and stayed on the page, the result was good. Google has done its job. The user is happy and does not return to the search engine, as in our example. However, if the person clicked on the result and after a few seconds returns back to Google for further searches, something is wrong with the result.
Direct feedback
Google passionately collects information about clicks and returns. And it uses them all the time. Direct feedback from the user is absolutely the best and strongest signal it can get. It almost unerringly indicates whether a given result is useful or not. Of course, Google has to collect this direct feedback from users discreetly, so it uses those indicators I wrote about above. Google won’t put a big button in the SERPs next to each result that says: “HEY, IS THIS RESULT GOOD?” to get feedback. Seers would pounce en masse on such a button and try to manipulate the results, to the point of clicking the button next to their page. These discrete indicators, on the other hand, pass under the radar of most seers and thus Google exploits them. Although I won’t say that I haven’t heard of seovers testing the hypothesis posed in this article and gathering into groups massively re-clicking serps to raise the CTRs of their sites.
Results outside the TOP 10
On the other hand, the use of CTRs and bounce rates on the downstream results pages doesn’t make much sense anymore, because almost no one goes to those downstream results pages. On the further pages, the old rules of the game apply. There, the battle of links, social network signals, optimization and all other indicators is fought. Pages that emerge victorious from this battle are passed on to the top 10 on a test basis, where they are implicitly evaluated by users in terms of click-through rate, dwell time on the page and possible exit. If the page proves unhelpful, it returns to further positions. If it proves useful, it moves higher until it encounters a page of higher value to the user.
How did we come up with this?
How did we get to this point? Thanks to an incident that arose on the client’s site. Our client’s site had one subpage that was not optimized. This subpage was only a small addition, independent of the main functionality of the site. For this reason, no one had previously paid attention to its optimization. I thought that since someone wanted to toil and create this subpage, it was worth endowing it with good optimization. I changed <title> of the page and wrote a nice meta description. That’s it. Very advanced SEO. In fact, the heights of optimization. After a few days, the robot looked at the sub-page again and it immediately entered further TOP 10 under its keyword. It began to collect traffic and move up. Currently it is in the first position under every possible combination of phrases related to its main keyword. This one subpage alone generates more than 100 hits from Google per day.
Below is the click graph. With one small optimization, traffic to the site increased tenfold:
All thanks to the fact that this subpage was very solidly crafted and did a great job of meeting the needs of a user having a problem that this page solved. Google noticed this and pulled it to the first place. Without the help of links or other signals. My optimization helped it break through to the top 10 but further down the subpage managed itself.
It also works the other way
Similarly, we had a situation in which the whole mechanism worked the other way. One of our client’s subpages completely accidentally began to rank for the keyword “roxa” (4th position) and collected several thousand impressions per day. People typing this keyword were completely uninterested in our client’s product range. They were more interested in roksa.pl ladies and that’s where all the clicks were going. Because of this, the subpage had almost zero CTR and after a few days it fell out of the top 10.
Author: Amadeus Gavino
