If you hadn’t yet noticed, Google Webmaster Tools has really been adding a ton of new features. Making the announcement on the Webmaster Central blog last week, a Google rep wrote:
We previously just reported the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now you can click on a given search query in the Top search queries report to see a breakdown of the number of impressions and the amount of clickthrough for each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query.
The obvious question here might be what, if any, practical value do these new data provide?
And the answer is that it depends on much traffic and search volume your site gets.
For years, SEOs have been trying to get a good handle on the relative value of a certain position on a SERP. One might ask: is ranking thirteen significantly better than fifteen for a [insert any keyword here]? Alternatively, is ranking in any spot on the first page of a certain keyword more valuable than ranking in the top twenty results for another?
These questions are extremely important for SEO strategy. If a single keyword-position is 100x valuable than another, then a smart SEO could know exactly where to spend his resources.
Unfortunately, it has been impossible to even begin estimating the relative value of keywords. Aside from a few academic studies of user behavior and information gleaned from the notorious AOL search data set (both several years old), we just don’t have reliable information on how clickthrough rates relate to ranking.
This information is so vital because (at least in theory), the number of visitors a site will receive from organic search for a given keyword is a simple function of search volume muliplied by the percentage of clicks that go to its ranking position.
In reality, the situation is far more complicated. Besides the obvious seasonal and statistical variation that we see, every keyword will have a different profile of CTR per position. A keyword that is highly qualified (such as a query for “wikipedia.org”) will likely have an unusally-high number of clicks going to the top-ranked page.
Fortunately, the new feature in Webmaster Tools, by breaking down search engine visits by position, will give professionals something to go by. By carefully paying attention to the CTR relative to impressions of major keywords, we will be able to begin to get a sense of the importance of position for keywords and entire sites.
And as with all things, the larger the sample size, the more reliable and valuable the data will be. A higher number of impressions will decrease the likelihood that an observation is a statistical anomaly. And eventually, with many clients, many keywords, and many verticals, it should be possible for a vigilant SEO to really get a sense of what CTR distribution is on Google as a whole.
Of course, this all assumes that the initial data are reliable, which (especially considering issues we’ve been seeing with Google Places lately), might not be a good assumption to make.
