Are your Google rankings based on your conversion rate?
Mike is an expert in search marketing, search technology, social media, publishing, text analytics, and web metrics, who regularly makes speaking appearances.
Mike’s previous appearances include Text Analytics World, Rutgers Business School, SEMRush webinar, ClickZ Live.
Mike also founded and writes for Biznology, is the co-author of Outside-In Marketing (with James Mathewson) and the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (now in its 3rd edition, and sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly, named by the Miami Herald as one of the 11 best business books of 2007.
Conversion Rate?
There is no way Google can know your conversion rate.
Period.
It won’t know if people have called you, emailed you, followed you on a social platform and made contact there, shared your content, signed up for an email list – or what ever other Goal you have.
Though I’ve explained Patterning and utilising data for years, most SEO’s don’t seem to grasp the implications (it’s so nice to see someone else reference it :D).
Instead they sit there and say things like “Google are using Google Analytics data” or “it’s page dwell time”.
Google cannot identify this sort of thing on a page by page or page by site basis.
(They can have a darn good guess mind you – but the chances are, they look for negatives, as positives are far more subjective and personal! Thus the creation of things like Panda.)
What they do have access to is SERP data.
But, about 2-3 years ago – when asked, 2 Googlers (at different times) both denied using CTRs in the SERPs as a ranking signal.
It’s odd, as there’s actually a Patent for it.
Things may have changed since then.
You mentioned Ranking and Leads.
Here’s the thing – we don’t know what terms get us traffic in most cases now because of G’s wonderful stripping of Search Parameters (that still hurts!).
Attempting to check every page on a site for the various potential traffic generating terms is highly inefficient.
So there is a strong chance that though you may see rankings for a general, keyword focused search, going down … you may still rank highly/strongly for longer phrases that are much closer to the pages content/intention.
The other factor to consider is Title and Description. I’ve seen plenty of sites at the top of the listings that are just plain unappealing. I find myself, as a searcher, clicking the 3rd, 4th or even 8th listing on a page at times, simply because they have a Title or Description that gives a stronger sense of relevance.
So I wouldn’t discount that as a possible source for higher than expected leads from SERPs.
Thanks for your comment, R. I agree with you–it isn’t that Google has exact numbers for many of these metrics, but they do have signals that tell them how to bet. And they are placing those bets every day.
“This goes against everything we’ve ever thought about in search marketing”
No it doesn’t, it simply goes against what the “experts” think about Search, in assuming that ‘rankings’ (that probably only you see) == qualified visitors === Sales. Last century when Search was very new, that was, sort of correct’ but as the Internet and it’s users have grown up, it is no longer the case and is really about time that the “experts” caught up with reality.
Also, Google has absolutely no idea about conversion rates for any and every page on every website that exists on the Internet, so in considering such a possibility is simply adding to the misinformation about Search.
Thanks for the comment, Chris. I can’t exactly tell, but I think we agree with each other.
I’ve been going against the experts for years in advising that the marketing part of search marketing is more important than the search part–that if you aren’t increasing your sales, it doesn’t matter what else you are doing.
I think it is a bit of hyperbole to say that Google has absolutely no idea about conversion rates–I think they have a guess for everyone, but you are right that they don’t know for sure about any particular situation.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment.
Hey mike,
Really a nice article and understood the new fact about the google.which indeed is helpful.
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