John Mueller during Google Office hours this last Tuesday brought up some good topics… Googlebot scans the internet constantly, but different changes in your website can take time to be reflected in rankings. Things like redirects to a new site can create a hit in your rankings, but as Googlebot finds the new site, you will recover, if everything is good with the new site.    Same thing with bad links or hacked content, when you fix the site, Googlebot will clean up any bad notes in Webmaster Tools and the site will be re-ranked accordingly.   
 
John said that new algorithm changes happen all the time.   While there are sometimes major changes like the Panda or Penguin updates which penalized sites heavily for spammy backlinks, “the best way to improve your rankings is to look at the big picture and go in the general direction of improving user experience.”
 
For instance in the new Google Mobile Friendly update, page load speed is a primary factor.  Rank Ranger has provided a mobile-friendly test as part of it’s On-Page Optimization report.

Rank Ranger’s Mobile Friendly Test for Android & iOS

Hover over the question marks for description and further instructions for correcting issues that make a site non-mobile friendly.

If you want to know the speed of your site, that is also built into our On-Page Keyword Optimization tools.

Improve Clickthrough Rate (CTR) for Ranking Boost

One measure of user friendliness, an important Google ranking factor, can be considered Click Through Rate.   When a user searches with a keyword, the organic results page displays page titles, descriptions and links.   Matt Cutts describes the process and importance of quality page titles and snippets (AKA description) on SERP ranking in this video.   Since Google uses the Page Title and a snippet describing the webpage, we provide a SERP Preview in our On-Page tool to give you a visual of how Google will display the page in search engine results and determine if that you’re using an appropriate number of characters and/or pixels.

Which snippet converts the most Click Through Rate the best is the real question.

 

There can be interesting avenues when analyzing ClickThrough Rates (CTR).  In Webmaster Tools, you can see the impressions of your SERP result.    If you are on Page One, it implies the greatest amount of impressions, later pages, amount to less or no impressions.    Your Click Through Rate is the number of people that clicked on your site link.   It happens that you may have a high number of impressions (Page 1) results, but a low number of Click Throughs, in which case, John said in answer to a question, “you may have only been on the first page of rankings only briefly and then disappeared” and were knocked off the front page, or were gone from rankings altogether.    Or you may have other reasons people searched for your keyword, only for information, with no intention of clicking through.   Both cases, it’s important to increase your click through rate.   Even Webmaster Tools forum does its SEO and John mentioned that they have a similar problem with CTR. 

About The Author

Michael has his sights on being a Rank Ranger scout. Always searching for the perfect website, scouring the world for SEO tips, optimizing photos, content and links. Whatever can be projected from an LED screen, can be a marketing tool.

Michael believes that Rank Ranger is the ultimate haven for SEO warriors and is passionate about guiding them to find the best way to use our SEO software – reports, graphs, tools and white label features – to improve the way they manage SEO and digital marketing!