Thursday, April 17, 2008

More Impatience Means SEO More Important (response)

Not sure if there's an easier way to respond to these things than just to add another post but in my weakened hung-over state this will have to do. I wanted to say something about SEO and the value of having organizations have a high natural search ranking. I've never worked in SEO but I used to optimize advertiser accounts for the little AdWords text ads that populate next to organic search results on Google and I can tell you from looking at CTR's of those ads, that absolutely nobody clicks on ads that aren't displayed on the first page of search results. In fact, we would see an enormous difference in CTR's between an ad that was displayed in the top position (i.e. at the top of the page) and one that was displayed in the third or fourth position. Users, it seems, would search only those first few results and once they had skimmed over the first three or four, that was it, and the click through rates correspondingly declined. If I remember correctly, we would see something like a 70-80% decline in CTR's from the fourth to the fifth ad ranking. From our perspective, that made it absolutely imperative to push up advertisers rankings to the highest spot possible.

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