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SEO Experiment: Do Queries and Clicks Influence Rankings

The subject of this blog might be a little left field, but is something that people in the SEO world have noticed for some time now. This is that queries and clicks can influence your rankings in the search engine results pages (serps).

Google doesn’t let us in on their ranking algorithms, however over time we just get a feel for what does and doesn’t influence rankings. By ‘queries’ I mean the keywords and phrases that people type into Google’s search field and by ‘clicks’ I mean that they actually click on one of the search results.

How does this fit together? Well the theory is if you drive traffic to Google and have that traffic perform a search and then click on the results. The listings that get the most clicks will move up in rankings.

An example is if you had a decent number of Twitter followers (say a few thousand). You know you rank #3 for searches relating to “product A”. If you tweet out something about product A and send your followers the Google search result and they click through to your site, then a little while later (a few hours), your ranking will likely move up a spot or two.

Some of you may be wondering why not just send them directly to the webpage for the post? Well it all comes down to how Google ranks pages and it appears that Google likes to see a diverse source of traffic. This means that if you increase the traffic via the serps, because you sent people directly to Google, the theory is that Google thinks that your post is very popular and it starts to rank it higher and to even present your post in the auto suggest component of the serps.

Conclusion

Most businesses send social messages linking directly to their websites, which doesn’t necessarily help rankings. By creatively getting them to your site via a Google search, you gain the benefit of increasing your site rankings as well. Double bonus!

For more creative SEO strategies, call us on 02 8211 0668, email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.

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Michael Lam

Co-founder of Cornerstone and web junkie, Michael knows just how to diagnose your online problems and remedy the issue. An online enthusiast who believes in technology as an enabler of growth, Michael worries about all the details so you don't have to.