Know Your Index Status Before Ranking on Google/SERP

By SEO Practitioner in Web Analytics
index status and search engine result pages

Your current index status allows understanding the number of pages that has been listed on search results page (SERP) from your website. A web page that is visible in search results is a consequence of page indexed by google in its search engine results processed through search engine algorithm. The index status helps to identify an indexing trend or any problems with your site if you are struggling to get your pages listed in SERPs.

If you have fixed number of pages for your site, for example – a site of 5 pages and all pages are indexed on google search results, then nothing to worry about indexing issues. If you have a website and you’ve been adding additional pages with your content development campaign, then the graph should be growing to assure a new contents is being discovered, crawled and indexed to search result page.

Check your index status on regular basis. Sometimes you may encounter a high number of pages has been indexed than the number of your pages it should be. This unusual scenario can be expected due to you canonicalization issues, auto-generated pages or the site is hacked and stuffed with additional pages. Similarly, a sudden spikes or drops on index status can be encountered when there is a problem with the technical configuration of the site, optimization of a robots.txt file, numbers of pages added or deleted, server overload, redirects, changed in hosting, plugins installed/uninstalled or other security issues.

Keep monitor you index status and review all the possible cases to avoid a potential loss from your online business and optimize your SEO campaign accordingly.

Looking for some assistance to see your web pages listed on search engine result pages?

Let’s have a chat together and allow me to identify a problem to make sure all you available pages are correctly indexed on google and any other SERPs. You can write to me at writetohemanta@gmail.com with your problem or add me on skype:hemantamaharjan to discuss more in detail. I would be happy to help you to counter the issue.

What is Click Through Rate (CTR) in Search Analytics?

By SEO Practitioner in SEO, Web Analytics
what is ctr?

In analytical term, click through rate is a measurement of a total number of clicks against the total number of an impression. More the clicks mean more users drive to the website and a high chance of business conversion. It is a machine learning user metrics to understand a scope to convert your traffic into the business goal and hence is one of the main factors to consider during data analytic and taka a reference for further optimization and changed strategy. For different campaigns with equal impression counts, CTR helps to determine which campaign is performing good and has more potential to success.

CTR can be either for search results page for google, yahoo or bing, facebook advert, google Adwords campaign in display/search network, email newsletter campaign, banner ads or any other marketing campaign that aim to provide an opportunity for any user to click on something they are looking for.

 

How to calculate CTR?

Mathematically, CTR is calculated as

CTR= (Total number of clicks/Total number of impression)x100%

For example: In search analytic, if total impression counts for one keyword is 150 and total number of clicks is 20, then, mathematically the CTR for that keyword is

CTR(Keyword)=20/150=13.33%

For advertisement, it would be

CTR= (Ad clicks/Ad Views)x100%

The Same rule applies for other keywords and marketing campaigns.

 

CTR and SEO

In Search engine optimization process, every online business aims to have the top position in search engine results for invaluable business opportunities. This is because the average impression counts and CTR for position 1-10 in the first phase are higher than in any other pages and the CTR decreases as we move to second, third and consequent pages. Even first, second and third position in the first page of search results has more average CTR than other position on the same page.

In SEO campaign, while working on keywords, people often target their main keywords to rank in top position. This is an ideal case but most of them miss a catch to identify other keywords including long tail keywords that have higher CTR despite low impression counts, low search volume, and low competitions .These keywords can take a huge share of business goals and could be enough to run a business.

For example, You can have some keywords with 1000 impression in search results and 25 clicks resulting 2.5% CTR. But you can also have some keywords with 50 impression counts and 25 clicks resulting 50% CTR. The summary is we should not miss the keywords that have 50% CTR despite only 50 search results impression counts and should optimize to grow more.

 

How to maximize your CTR?

Maximizing you CTR is not a one time job. It depends on user behavior, trending keywords and how you often optimize your campaign to grow your impression counts. Though here are some ideas to consider for CTR growth:

  • Increase your impression counts
  • Optimize your campaign for user
  • Focus on relevancy of content, images, tags etc
  • Use compelling headlines and text.
  • Apply call to action button
  • Check what your competitors are doing
  • Understand the behavior of users and re-optimize your campaign

If you not sure with your current CTR and looking for a more online business opportunity with search analytic, contact me for a free SEO consultation, analytic report, and suggestions to improve your CTR and grab an opportunity to get a business from potential keywords that have high CTR you might be missing.

What is Bounce Rate?

By SEO Practitioner in Web Analytics
what is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is a mathematic figure used for web traffic analysis to understand the users behavior for the pages that they landed from various sources. It is a one of major UI/UX metrics to consider your complete website navigation architecture including how your pages are interlinked with each other.

 

Bounce Rate Calculation

Bounce rate of any page is calculated as a percentage of total bounces per total entrances.

Mathematically,

Bounce rate = (Total Bounces/Total Entrances)X100%

For example: If we have 100 total visitors for the website homepage and 40 of them bounces back without surfing other pages in website, then it’s bounce rate will be

Bounce rate=(40/100)x100%
=40%

The overall website’s bounce rate is calculated in the same fashion.

 

Optimal Bounce Rates For Different Industries

As per google analytics benchmark, the bounce rate of an average website is 40% but in regular practice, it depends on the type of campaign, nature of a content, main motive of the page and how overall conversion is tracked. So depending upon the types of online businesses, the standard value of bounce rate should be following:

  • Content websites 40-60%
  • Lead generation sites 30-50%
  • Blogs 70-98%
  • Retail sites 20-40%
  • Service sites 10-30%
  • Landing pages 70-90%

The higher bounce rates that its optimal value as per industries is one of the major signal that affects ranking and overall website performance. There are numbers of reasons that contribute to high bounce rates and some issues to consider are:

  • Poor Site Architecture
  • Nonrelevant contents
  • Confused Navigation
  • Different from basic design convention
  • Website not optimized for mobile devices
  • Unwanted ads, pop-ups and push sales
  • Not having content variation
  • No use of whitespaces
  • Readability issues with formatting
  • Autoplay audio and videos

However, a user might leave the first landed page if they’ve found the relevant content as per their requirement and bounced back happily. So in this case, we can use the concept of remarketing by pitching relevant topics or offers to drive to other pages so that our bounce rate remains optimal.

 

How to improve bounce rate?

As we have numbers of reasons that can assure to our high bounce rate, we can apply following counterpart to obtain our ideal bounce rate and improve over time

  • Pitch relevant and in-depth content
  • Focus on site structure, navigation, user interface and user interaction
  • Use sidebar and footer section for remarketing
  • Optimize your anchor text and link among pages
  • Learn with self-experience and don’t practice or use anything that you don’t like when you are surfing other websites or pages.