There has been a lot of discussion around the intenet about whether CTR affect SERP (Search Engine Result Page) or not. It does makes sense what Google is trying to do. If many people clicks your website a lot in SERP, there must be something. Google wants to return the best for thier SERP. If in the top ten, rank 5 get much more clicks than rank 4, they might switch the rank.
Besides from CTR, Google can also decides the SERP by other statistics like bounce rates and average time on site. Low bounce rates and high average time in will probably increase SERP rank. Google can access this information from Google Analytics. It wil be nice if Google can implement that algorithm. We as readers can find usefull website more easily.
But although this is very usefull, there are a lot of flaws in it. People could outsmart Google. You could easily edit your titles and descriptions of your web pages, so people will click it more at SERP. Same with bounce rates, it is hard to determine how much does a low bounce rates is. Previously on my post about analyzing Bounce Rate, I talk about bounce rate which is affected by the website type. Portal usually have much lower bounce rates like 10-30%, because people will look for information there. While a simple sales page with ‘buy now’ in the bottom of the site usually has higher bounce rate like 70-90%.
Bounce rate can be considered good or bad depending on the visitor’s activity. There are two posibility when a visitor did not click any internal link. First he reads the content, and has found something that he needs. Second he did not like the content and leave without clicking any internal page.
Conclusion: In my opinion it is nice if Google can find out the algorithm for SERP rank based on CTR and bounce rate. But my guess it is almost imposible. What do you think?
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You mentioned Google Analytics. Do you have to have that code in your sites, or does Google somehow monitor the bounce rate and visit length on its own? We operate an internet talk radio station and recently ran SEO, which helped us in a couple search engines (but amazingly, not Google!) Go figure…
Hi Kevin, In order to get your site analyzed, you should place a code near the bottom part of your page. You can visit Google Anaytics to learn more about the code placement. To help your site better indexed (especially in Google) You should build a sitemap. There are free sitemap builders that can automatically create compliant sitemaps for the major search engine. For Google - The next step would be including your site and sitemap using Google Webmasters Tools - Hopefully, your site pages will be indexed by Google soon :)
Interesting top. If you use Analytics… does Google look at the bounce rate and pages/per vist. They have the data – why wouldn’t they use it?
Well, maybe not yet... ;) But Adsense now can be linked with Analytics - We're getting there!
Any feedback from you?