Esther C Kane

There’s one tool that’s absolutely necessary when it comes to Internet marketing and that is Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). The amount of data it gives you is great and although, like everything else on the Internet it’s not 100% accurate and it’s not set in concrete – it’s still an excellent gauge to see what’s going on within your website pages.

Here’s how I use the Click Thru Rates that it gives me on the websites that I market monthly.

1) One of the columns of information on GWT is the “search queries”. You’ll see that on the dashboard when you log into GWT.

2) If you click on the “More >>” just below the list you’ll get a larger, more comprehensive list of phrases along with how many times your listing was shown on a Google page and how many “clicks” were made on that listing.

What does all this mean? Let me break it down. But to make it easier – I would recommend that you go into your GWT and follow along.

a) The list of “Query” or search phrases are the phrases that brought up your website in the search results. So, if someone types in “seo services” and your website shows up on the first page of Google (or even the 20th page) – Google will link that phrase with your website in this report.

It doesn’t mean someone clicked through to your site, it just means that your website was listed in the search results.

b) The list of “Impressions” is the number of times pages from your website came up in the search results. So, if the number under ‘Impressions’ is 500 then that means that your website came up in the search results for that particular keyword phrase 500 times.

c) The list of “Clicks” is the number of visitors who clicked on the search result from your website. This is an important number but there’s more information you need to know before you take any action on this number.

d) The list of “Avg. Position” is the estimated average position of the highest point of where your website was listed in the search result. So, if I typed in “seo services” and a page on your website came up as the 4th result on the page, then I would see #4 in this list.

There are additional data but for now, let’s deal with using this information.

The first thing you should do when you’re looking at this information is to see what the Avg. Position is for each keyword phrase. I mean, if the average position is #50, it would be very unlikely that you’re going to get many clicks only because your website is on the 5th page of results.

BUT, if the Avg. Position is #3 and you still have a very low number of Clicks then you’ll want to see what is in that meta description tag. Why is the information on the search results not bringing in traffic?

In this instance, the problem has nothing to do with the optimization of the website page because the website is showing up on the first page of Google and even better, in the top 5. But, even though it has that high ranking, it’s still not getting clicked on. So, what’s the problem?

>> Are the words in the description meta tag explaining correctly what the page is about?

>> Maybe you need a call to action in that description tag?

Review the other results that are above and below your on the search results page to see if you can find any clues on how to improve your Clicks.

On the other side – if a keyword phrase has an average position other than the top 10, then you need to get working on the optimization for that keyword phrase. This may mean…

1) adding more information to the website about that topic.
2) breaking down the page, maybe there’s too much content on the page itself.
3) changing the keyword phrase itself – maybe the competition is too high or the relevancy to your website is too low.

Have your Internet marketer help you with this – there are many factors to consider when making these changes.

But I do hope that this lesson helps you to understand how we Internet marketers look at websites. (I know, it’s the Matrix – I know). But I promise, if you take the Red Pill – you can still live other parts of your life in the Blue Pill!