If you ask any webmaster where they want their website to appear in the SERPs, they will likely respond ‘number one!’ but is that really important these days? For most businesses, the answer is actually “no”.
Which Results are Getting Clicked on the Most?
Even as recently as a year ago, holding the top spot was crucial for your click through rate – the first result on the top page was getting more than 31 percent of all clickthroughs, and the spots on pages two and three were earning just 5.59 percent of all clickthroughs. That picture has changed a lot, however. Today, search engines adapt to each individual, so what is number one for you will not be number one for a friend searching for the same keyword or phrase. This means that it’s a waste of time to try and rank number one for anything in particular – because rankings are such an individual thing.
Other Ways of Attracting Attention
The good news is that there are ways to attract the attention of a searcher regardless of what spot your results are in. Perhaps the most beneficial is to use rich snippets. These are search result snippets that feature images, callouts, star ratings, related pages and other embellishments, making them more useful and more eye-catching than simple results. Rich snippets can increase your clickthrough rate by as much as 13 percent – if not more – compared to normal results. They draw the eye to the result, and they build trust, too. Users assume that rich-snippet using websites are more reputable and trustworthy, and more professionally run too – even though anyone can add rich snippets to their websites using some relatively simple schema markup. Of course, simply adding schema markup to your website won’t make it rank better. You will still need good content, and you really need to get your website on to the front page otherwise your markup won’t get seen by anyone in the first place. However, if your content is strong and you do have good incoming links, then rich snippets will make a difference to how often your front page results are engaged with. It is well worth looking at using them as a way of improving your CTR, and cutting down on the amount that you need to spend on paid search in order to meet your traffic goals in the long term.
