10 statistics that demonstrate the value of SEO

Posted by Iain on Thu (17/05/07) at 4:04pm to Web Project Management, Web Design, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Analytics

These statistics source from a compilation of SERPS behaviour studies for which I’ve listed source information at the end of the article. If you disagree with a figure, or have additional figures or sources, please do post them to the discussion.

1. 42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second-ranking link, and the click-through rate (CTR) continues to drop thereof.
2. When these two top-ranking links are artificially switched, the click-through ratio of 42-8% drops to 34-12%, demonstrating the importance of engaging copy in addition to rank position.
3. 62% of search users click a link on the first page of search results
4. 23% of searches progress to the second page. Presumably the difference between 62% ans 23% stems from searchers trying either another keyword or another engine, or giving up.
5. 80% f unsuccessful searches are followed with keyword refinement.
6. 41% of searches unsuccessful after the first page choose to refine thir keyword search phrase or their chosen search engine.
7. 77% of search users choose organic over paid listing when searching, 67% choose organic search when purchasing.
8. When the searcher is purchasing, organic click-through generates 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PP) click-through.
9. 40% of SEO campaigns aware of their ROI achieve returns in excess of 500%, while only 22% of PPC campaigns were able to achieve this value.
10. Daily use of search engines rose from 33% in 2002 to 59% in 2005. The average day in 2005 reported 60 million people using a search engine. As of March 2007, Google accounts for 64% of US searches and 77% of UK searches

The validity of these statistics depend on various experimental factors (i.e. large, representative samples of searchers/searches), and on accurate statistical analysis.

For more in depth analysis, the sources for this article were:

• comScore / Pew Internet
• Nielson
• Webxico
• iProspect
• SEOResearcher

Please post addition figures or sources, or your view, in the comments.

Website Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - How Do You Measure Up?

Posted by Iain on Fri (9/03/07) at 11:24am to Web Project Management, Web Analytics

If you are still using just hits and pageviews to measure your website’s performance, it’s time to ask yourself a few questions about how well you understand the performance of your website. How do these metrics contribute to understanding of how well you are acheiving your business objectives? eMarketing is just like offline marketing, in that requires measurement followed by optimisation. Only better, because we have more data.

Thus, central to every web project should be a Website Performance tracking sheet outlining targets and progress across a variety of measures that together communicate to your web management teams a picture of performance towards objectives. Use your imagination to find those indicators that provide into the performance of your website.

Below are a few alternative metrics to get you thinking. Do you know how well youre website is performing? What would your targets be?

• New Referrers
• Basket Size
• Repeat Purchase Count
• Number of Commenters / Comments
• Other Content Contributions
• Monthly Membership Registrations
• Newsletter Subscriber Count
• Click-Thrus from Newsletter Links
• Number of Social Bookmarks (i.e. Diggs)

Update: Bud Caddell has also written a post about website performance indicators along similar lines over at seoMoz.org, with a more exhaustive list.