SEO NEWS – HOW TO CALCULATE ORGANIC SEO CLICK THROUGH RATE

Years ago the SEO team at MOVE was feeling pretty smart about using the Google adwords keyword tool and our internal reporting system and keyword rank reports to generate a report on the click through rate from free SEO targeted keywords by position. We essentially just took the traffic we were receiving by keyword and divided it by the adwords impressions data. Simple to do, but a little time consuming for covering many keywords. However, the end result was that we used that data for several reasons, one being to optimize our meta data for improved CTR from Google, and another being that we could forecast potential traffic gains given known click through rates by position.

However today Google has quietly improved GWT by offering organic SEO CTR inside the application!

This is HUGE NEWS for SEO managers! It is a great time saver compared to how we arrived at the data up until this enhancement, and I am seeing that the data in the new reports does add up quite nicely

So if this is something your not doing now, it is now super easy to do and I highly recommend it. Go check out your Google Webmaster Tools, look at your position 1 keywords first, and consider testing some changes to your meta descriptions. Then watch to see if you can increase your click through rates.

Also if you are having a hard time getting internal resources allocated to SEO projects, you can now say stuff like:

“Well we see our average CTR for popsition1 keywords is X%, and for position 2 it is X%, position 3 is X% and so on. Then you could use this data to propose an SEO traffic forecast based on a range of possibilities such as a 1 or two position gain and so on.

Enjoy, and good luck. I’m very glad to see Google has opened this feature up in Google Webmaster Tools today.