Back in October we announced a variation of this function and how to “Maximize your Top Ranking Keyword Performance” since then we have enhanced this functionality significantly to make it easier to identify opportunities and show the missed opportunity.
The key factor of this analysis is these words are already ranking well ? in position 1, 2 or 3 so the hard work is done. Once identified we just need to determine why our highly relevant page to the topic is not getting clicked by searchers. Using this sample account we can illustrate the value of this sort of analysis:
In this example for the phrase ?car rental? there is over 28,000 searches a week for this phrase and they are currently ranking #1 so we expect them to be able to get at least 5% of the clicks. Note, this demo site currently has a 34% click rate on non-branded #1 ranking terms so 5% is quite conservative. Unfortunately, they only received 164 clicks or .58% share of the clicks missing out on an expected 1,242 that they should have received. Given their current revenue yield, had they received those visits, they would have increased their weekly revenue by nearly $10k. These are the types of quick fixes that management likes to see since they have a direct impact to the bottom line.
So what do we do with this knowledge? The course of action in this case is to look at their listing in Google’s search results and see if it is as compelling as the other top ranking keywords. If the snippet is bad adjust the page copy and meta description to improve it. Sometimes the wrong page is ranking such as a PDF or a support page and the description from that page does not encourage clicks.
We might also look at our paid search data to see if we are getting clicks in paid search ? we can click the keyword and go into keyword details.
Based on our integration of paid and organic data in our application, we can see they have the keyword active both in broad and exact match campaigns. The paid is not doing much better getting only 35 clicks (about 1/3) of those they received from organic. We can therefore assume, our PPC message is not very compelling either resulting in a negative ROI in paid search.
You should repeat this process looking at least at the top 10 keywords in the default view to help you identify some quick fixes that can bring some quick traffic increases. If you would like to identify your underperforming organic keywords contact us for a demo.