Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Everybody knows that getting on the number one position in any of the search engines, and especially the big G, has its rewards in the form of lots and lots of (if you’ve done your keyword research correctly) very valuable and free targeted traffic.

Whats frustrating to most though is how much traffic?  Keyword estimation tools such as Keyword Discovery, and Wordtrackergive you a rough guesstimate of how much traffic a certain keyword generates overall but does not tell you how that figure is broken down.

Luckily, there are a few studies out there that have estimated the click through rates on the various positions in the search engines (mainly Google).  SEOmoz, estimates clickthrough rates for SERPS as follows:

While another study conducted by a group of students at New York’s Cornell University predicts the following clickthrough rates in the Google SERPS (search engine results pages):

• Position 1 receives 56.36% of the clicks

• Position 2 receives 13.45% 

• Position 3 receives 9.82%

• Position 4 receives 4.00%

• Position 5 receives 4.73%

• Position 6 receives 3.27%

• Position 7 receives 0.36%

• Position 8 receives 2.91%

• Position 9 receives 1.45%

• Position 10 receives 2.55%

As you can see, the above SERP clickthrough estimates show that ranking above the fold -and especially in the top 3 positions- generates between 60 to 80% of all possible clickthroughs for any keyword.

Lesson to take from this post..make sure you (or your seo agency) make efforts to rank above the fold (top 3 serp positions), anything less is just not good enough!

Do you research your competitor’s seo strategy and activities?  If you don’t then you should, this is the only way to beat them at their own SEO game.

Firstly lets define a competitor. Comptetitors are not necessarily your traditional bricks and mortar competitors.  Your online competitors are the websites with the number one to five positions in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for the keywords you’re targeting.

Now that you’ve discovered your true competitors, its time to start researching their seo strategy in order to discover why they are ranking on top of the serps.

There are a few things you can do immediately to get an overview of their seo strategy:

1. Perform a site colon search for their url on Google.  This will show you all the pages in their site listed in Google.  So for example if you’re trying to research my site, you would typed in the Google search box site:omarkattan.com. Analysing the results of the site colon test you can quickly find out if their doing seo or not and if they are, you can find out what keywords their trying to target in their meta tags.   

2. Next, go to Yahoo! and perform a link colon for their url.  This will take you to Yahoo’s site explorer where you can start researching your competitor’s link popularity.   Make sure to select the drop down options of “Except from this Domain” and “Entire Site”  This will exclude any internal links and will show links pointing to the entire site, not just the homepage.

3. Go to Technorati and type in the domain name into the search box.  This will show you how popular your competitor is in the blogosphere

4. Go to Google image search and type the domain name in the search box.  his will show you if their images are optimised to show up in the search results (an increasingly important factor) as Universal Search is becoming the norm.

5. Go to YouTube and type in their URL, this will show you if their optimising for video search, again a universal search biggy.

The above are but a few factors you can measure, there are many more, but if you start with the above, you’ll be in a better position to implement a winning seo strategy.

Keyword Research is at the heart of proper SEO and PPC optimisation.  Without the right keywords, how will you know which keywords to target in both your SEO and PPC campaigns?  The answer is your wouldn’t know and you’ll simply be throwing mud on a wall.

Keyword Research for SEO

Keyword research should be conducted at the outset of any SEO campaign efforts.  Keyword research should begin with a brainstorming process that uncovers all potential keywords associated with the industry.  At this stage it is crucial not to rule out any keywords and to keep an open mind.

Resources for Keyword Research

Once the keyword brainstorm stage is done, its time to expand the list by using Keyword Research tools.  There are many keyword research tools out there both free and commercial that can help you at this sage and for convenience, I’ve listed my favourite ones here:

Now that you’re hopefully inspired,  go off and research those keywords that will bribng you the traffic you deserve!