Search (SERP) Click Through Rates – Is SEO Work Going To Be Worth The Effort For Your Belize Business?

The most common request that is made of us is – “I want to rank high for (fill in the terms…).  What do I need to do to get there.”  This request is often made with the expectation that search traffic is “free” and that once highly ranked the traffic will just flowing to their site hopefully resulting in significantly new business.  Overall, search marketing and high rankings can result in increased business but before even trying do go down this road it is important to realize that high search rankings are rarely easily obtained and to get highly ranked requires displacing others already there – that takes time, effort and often financial resources to achieve the high ranking and especially to stay there.

Also, even if your site is on the first page for a particular term, this does not mean it will result in significant traffic.  As the chart below show, even being on the first page, unless your site is one of the top two sites then less than 10% of the people doing a search will click through to your site.  For rankings low on the first page the click through rate (CTR) is close to 3% meaning that if a 1000 people search for a term in a month and you are listed 8th on the page that will usually result in only an additional 10 to 30 visitors a month.

Chart obtained from Philip Petrescu on Moz Blog

In addition, there are times that the SEO resources used to obtain and maintain high search rankings are not the most effective way to increase traffic to a site.  We recently were working with a client and after some research it was found that if we diverted the money used for maintaining high rankings into their Adwords campaign we could more than double the traffic obtained from search.  So comparing results from SEO to other marketing methods is important in determining the best use of marketing dollars.

In short, before going down the SEO road do some research into how much obtaining and maintaining high rankings is going to cost, what is the likely number of visitors to your site that will result and if there are other marketing methods that match or exceed your SEO results.  After doing your homework you will likely obtain the best outcome.  Good luck….