Rand Fishkin posted another brilliant Whiteboard Friday last week on the topic of optimizing for RankBrain. In it, he explained how RankBrain helps Google select and prioritize signals it uses for ranking.
One of the most important signals Google takes into account is user engagement. As Rand noted, engagement is a "very, very important signal."
Engagement is a huge but often ignored opportunity. That's why I've been a bit obsessed with improving engagement metrics.
My theory has been that RankBrain *and/or other machine learning elements within Google's core algorithm are increasingly rewarding pages with high user engagement. Not always, but it's happening often enough that it's kind of a huge deal.
Google is looking for unicorns – and I think that machine learning is Google's ultimate Unicorn Detector.
Now, when I say unicorns, I mean those pages that have magical engagement rates that elevate them above the other donkey pages Google could show for a given query. Like if your page has a 5 percent click-through rate (CTR) when everyone else has a 1 percent CTR.
What is Google's mission? To provide the best results to searchers. One way Google does this is by looking at engagement data.
If most people are clicking on a particular search result – and then also engaging with that page – these are clear signals to Google that people think this page is fascinating. That it's a unicorn.
RankBrain: Into Darkness
RankBrain, much like Google's algorithm, is a great mystery. Since Google revealed (in a Bloomberg article just under a year ago) the important role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in its algorithm, RankBrain has been a surprisingly controversial topic, generating speculation and debate within the search industry.
Then, we found out in June that Google RankBrain was no longer just for long-tail queries. It was "involved in every query."
We learned quite a few things about RankBrain. We were told by Google that you can't optimize for it. Yet we also learned that Google's engineers don't really understand what RankBrain does or how it works.
Some people have even argued that there is absolutely nothing you can do to see Google's machine learning systems at work.
Give me a break! It's an algorithm. Granted, a more complex algorithm thanks to machine learning, but an algorithm nonetheless. All algorithms have rules and patterns.
When Google tweaked Panda and Penguin, we saw it. When Google tweaked its exact-match domain algorithm, we saw it. When Google tweaked its mobile algorithm, we saw it.
If you carefully set up an experiment, you should be able to isolate some aspect of what Google is proclaiming as the third most important ranking factor. You should be able to find evidence – a digital fingerprint.
Well, I say it's time to boldly go where no SEO has gone before. That's what I've attempted to do in this post. Let's look at some new data.
The search for RankBrain [New Data]
What you're about to look at is organic search click-through rate vs. the average organic search position for three separate 30-day periods ending April 30, July 12, and September 19 of this year. This data, obtained from the Google Search Console, tracked the same keywords in the Internet marketing niche.
I see some of the most compelling evidence of RankBrain (and/or other machine learning search algorithms!) at work.
The shape of CTR vs. ranking curve is changing every month – for the 30 days ending:
- April 30, 2016, the average CTR for top position was about 22 percent.
- July 12, 2016, the average CTR rose to about 24 percent.
- By September 19, 2016, the average CTR increased to about 27 percent.
The top, most prominent positions are getting even more clicks. Obviously, they were already getting a lot of clicks. But now they're getting more clicks than they have in recent history.
This is the winner-take-all nature of Google's organic SERPs today. It's coming at the expense of Positions 4–10, which are being clicked on much less over time.
Results that are more likely to attract engagement are pushed further up the SERP, while results with lower engagement get pushed further down. That's what we believe RankBrain is doing.
Going beyond the data
This data is showing us something very interesting. A couple thoughts:
- This is exactly the fingerprint you would expect to see for a machine learning-based algorithm doing query interpretation that impacts rank based on user engagement metrics, such as CTR.
- Essentially, machine learning systems move away from serving up 10 blue links and asking a user to choose one of them and toward providing the actual correct answers, further eliminating the need for lower positions.
Could anything else be causing this shift to the click curve? Could it have been the elimination of right rail ads?
No, that happened in February. I was careful to use date ranges that were after the right rail apocalypse.
Could it be more Knowledge Graph elements creeping into the SERPs? If that were the case, it would look like everything got pushed down by one position (e.g., Position 1 becomes Position 2, Position 2 becomes Position 3, and so on).
The data didn't show that happening. We see a bending of the click curve, not a shifting of the curve.
Behold the awesome power of CTR optimization!
OK, so we've looked at the big picture. Now let's look at the little picture to illustrate the remarkable power of CTR optimization.
Let's talk about guerrilla marketing. Here are two headlines. Which headline do you think has the higher CTR?
- Guerrilla Marketing: 20+ Examples and Strategies to Stand Out
This was the original headline for an article published on the WordStream blog in 2014.
- 20+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples
This is the updated headline, which we changed just a few months ago, in the hopes of increasing the CTR. And yep, we sure did!
Before we updated the headline, the article had a CTR of 1 percent and was ranking in position 8. Nothing awesome.
Since we updated the headline, the article has had a CTR of 4.19 percent and is ranking in position 5. Pretty awesome, no?
Increasingly, we've been trying to move away from "SEO titles" that look like the original headline, where you have the primary keyword followed by a colon and the rest of your headline. They aren't catchy enough.
Yes, you still need to include keywords in your headline. But you don't have to use this tired format, which will deliver (at best) solid but unspectacular results.
To be clear: we only changed the title tag. No other optimization tactics were used.
We didn't point any links (internal or external) at it. We didn't add any images or anything else to the post. Nothing.
Changing the title tag changed the CTR. Which gave it "magical points" that resulted in 97 percent more organic traffic:
What does it all mean?
This example illustrates that if you increase your CTR, you'll see a nice boost in traffic. Ranking in a better position means more traffic, which means a higher CTR, which also means more traffic.
What's so remarkable is that this is on-page SEO. No link building was required! Besides, pointing new links to a page wouldn't result in a higher click-through rate – a catchier headline, however, would result in a higher CTR.
What's also interesting about this is that RankBrain isn't like other algorithms, say Panda or Penguin, where it was obvious when you got hit. You lost half your traffic!
If RankBrain or a machine learning algorithm impacts your site due to engagement metrics (positive or negative), it's a much more subtle shift. All your best pages do better. All your “upper class donkey” pages do slightly worse. Ultimately, the two forces cancel each other out, to some extent, so that the SEO alarms don’t go off.
The final frontier
When it comes to SEO, your mission is to seek out every advantage. It's my belief that organic CTR and website engagement rates impact organic rankings.
So boldly go where many SEOs are failing to go now. Hop aboard the USS Unicorn, make the jump to warp speed, and discover the wonders of those magical creatures.
Oh, and…
Are you optimizing your click-through rates? If not, why not? If so, what have you been seeing in your analytics?
Larry, I'm going to have to disagree here. I think you're helping a tree to grow now at the expense of burning down the whole forest later.
20+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples
This is the updated headline, which we changed just a few months ago, in the hopes of increasing the CTR. And yep, we sure did!
Before we updated the headline, the article had a CTR of 1 percent and was ranking in position 8. Nothing awesome.
Since we updated the headline, the article has had a CTR of 4.19 percent and is ranking in position 5.
So, basically, your advice is to make every headline clickbait? That's terrible. Not everything is about maximizing rankings and clicks. It's also about branding -- and clickbait makes one's brand looks cheap.
There's a certain article on my company's blog. (I didn't write or commission it -- it predates me.) It's clickbait to the extreme and ranks highly for a short-tail keyword. It brings a LOT of traffic. Guess what the conversion rate is? Something like 0.003%. It's one of the lowest-converting posts on our entire site in terms of both conversion rate and total conversions.
I have a guess as to why. When a person clicks on a clickbait headline, he also already subconsciously decided to take the resulting article and publisher less seriously. The brand is already hurt. So, it is far less likely that he will convert. Our post and guides that have "boring" and sober headlines convert a lot more because they are serious, the titles are serious, and people take them and us seriously. (We're in a dry, serious industry.) And they're ranking more highly and highly over time.
Larry, we need less clickbait on the Internet.
Hi, I work at WordStream. I disagree that changing a title to be more clickable necessarily equals "clickbait." The reason we didn't change anything else about the article is that the article was already really good! It was a popular article with lots of shares and comments and lots of organic traffic already. We just thought it could get more traffic with a better headline. The article delivers on the headline, so how is that clickbait? If people weren't satisfied with what they got after clicking, they'd bounce/pogo and that would be a negative signal to Google. (And to be clear, I changed the headline hoping to get more clicks/traffic even if the rank DIDN'T change.)
It doesn't make sense to write an awesome article and then sabotage it with a mediocre headline. The headline is just one of the many parts that send quality signals to Google.
We just thought it could get more traffic with a better headline.
The article delivers on the headline, so how is that clickbait?
20+ ---> Cliche lead with a number
Jaw-Dropping ---> Unnecessarily strong and exaggerated adjective
It's a worse headline. CTR is not the only measure of the quality of a headline.
Every time I see a headline like that, I roll my eyes. And I know a lot of non-marketers who do the same. And how do you think such a visceral reaction affects the brand of that given publication?
I hate clickbait titles, I really really do. Google ranks them pretty well unfortunately, so I have to swallow any counter arguments I have.
There's a lot more to marketing than Google rankings.
Too many digital marketers focus only on short-term results and ignore the big picture and long-term goals.
Sure, but this post is about Google rankings and the headlines (titles) are specifically for search - you'd use other elements for specific headlines to promote content in different channels. Not exactly what Larry's example did in this post, but your on page headline could be different, OG, etc..
So my question is, is it possible to do both?
Can we improve our CTR through more creative & innovative titles, yet retain the required company tone?
As marketers, can we use the good parts of our skills to be more eye-catching, but not veer into being Buzzfeeed et al? I hate to think that just because we're in a sober industry or topic, we can't do something positive on this without resorting to cliche, or putting off readers.
There are plenty of examples in other marketing disciplines, of being attractive and still converting. I'd have hope we can do the same (though many won't of course, but that's another issue)
Correction to Samuel Scott:
Too many [lesser quality] digital marketers focus only on short-term results and ignore the big picture and long-term goals.
Digital marketers need to be concerned with short term results as well as long term goals. And as you've said earlier, if a short-term result negatively impacts long term goals, such as branding, brand messaging, and brand association, then that marketer is doing a disservice to the company.
To me this feels like doing an A/B test on an email subject line and then choosing the loser because you hate clickbait. The new headline won the "test" so we're rolling with it. It's not our fault that readers generally like lists that start with numbers! We try lots of different styles of headlines but lists continue to do really well when they fit the intent of the query. (Queries that include the word "examples" definitely are looking for lists)
And this is how marketers will ruin the Internet.
The Sun (in the UK) has a circulation of 2.2 million. The New York Times has 1.7 million. Is The Sun more "successful"?
You can always get more and more readers -- or clicks or opens or whatever -- by going cheap through tabloid journalism or using clickbait headlines. But what is the cost of joining a race to the bottom?
I don't want the entire Internet to become BuzzFeed. Moreover, I would argue that sacrificing a little CTR in the short term leads to stronger brands over the long term because people will take you more seriously when what you publish is more serious from the very beginning -- from the time that all they see is a meta title or an e-mail subject line.
It really depends on your industry and who you are competing against. The NYT is not competing against tabloids. (Obviously.) Marketing companies are competing against other marketers and the rules of the game are slightly different. However, we believe that content should deliver on the promise of the headline, not make empty promises. I often ask writers to rewrite the headline because I think the content contains a lot more value than the headline advertises.
Nothing that the marketing industry has ever produced or will ever produce will be "jaw-dropping."
The Game-Changing Blog Comment That Will SHOCK You!!!
;) Apologies for the click-bait headline... Samuel I agree with you 100% but you're not exactly preaching to the choir here.
There was a Moz/Fractl study awhile back that found one in five of the respondents to a survey of millennials said that they only read the headlines in their feeds. I absolutely hate it and I'm sick of the flashy headline fad. But unfortunately this is a reflection of what people evidently want.
There's a reason why the Discovery Channel, once a respectable source of scientific information, now offers fake documentaries on Megalodon sharks and Animal Planet features shows like "Bigfoot Hunter." Evidently the masses respond most favorably to the sensational vs. reality.
Also, for what it's worth, the post in question on guerrilla marketing examples is actually quite good and an entertaining read. It's also picked up links in the last 6-8 months from some very high authority domains like Answers.com and Business.com. I would caution against attributing all of the rankings gain simply to the page title change given all of the external signals impacting this post.
@Elisa: "It really depends on your industry and who you are competing against. The NYT is not competing against tabloids. (Obviously.)"
No, that's false. The NYT is most certainly competing against tabloids. They're competing for attention and readership and where people get their news. People have a choice: do they pick up a tabloid to get their gossip, or do they pick up the NYT to get serious news?
They are most certainly competing.
I don't know why cant people understand the one and only simple thing that whatever we do is for users and whatever they do is ultimately comes to us. It is not about CTR or clickbait, its all about what users find helpful and unique in first attempt. Else we can debate on it for long. .
hi samuel - if you look at the google analytics screenshot for the page in question you'll see it has very strong user engagement metrics (time on page = 31 minutes 48 seconds). This to me clearly demonstrates that people don't view the content as click-bait and instead does a very strong job at matching query intent. Google is fighting click-bait in the SERPS by looking at other engagement metrics, in addition to CTR. For example, dwell time (aka pogo sticking) is most certainly being looked at to determine if a page is click bait or not.
Regarding the page you mentioned on your site - the one that you hate because it gets a lot of traffic but has terrible task completion metrics - that is a completely different story because the query intent is not aligned with page content as evidenced by the very low task completion rate you mentioned. Those types of pages are extremely vulnerable to future ML-algo updates and I strongly suggest fixing them (aligning query intent with page content) or deleting them as engagement metric scores are most certainly computed at a domain / subfolder / page / keyword level. Garbage pages like this essentially act as a cancer on your site, dragging down engagement scores and impacting other pages on your site.
Nothing to comment about this thread (there are things for which I agree with Samuel, but given the context I agree with Elisa in this specific case).
However, let me write just a quick note so to avoid misunderstandings for the readers not so into the SEO patents jargon:
Dwell time =/= Pogosticking.
In reality the second is the contrary of the first:
Dwell time is how much time a user spend in a website when landing from search (or other source), and it is usually related also to the amount of documents of a website viewed by a user during a session (and that's why a synonym of dwell time is long click).
More about it here: https://www.seobythesea.com/2013/03/google-query-refinements-orion/
Pogosticking is the contrary, because it refers to when:
Pogosticking is an "old friend" of SEOs, as this post by AJ Kohn published in 2008 demonstrates: https://www.blindfiveyearold.com/search-pogosticking-and-seo
click bait occurred to me as well. Additionally, I don't see anything about sharing activity it's a blog article, tight
we expect the new headline to increase social sharing activity as we have found that the same emotions that make people want to click on things like crazy in the SERPS also cause people to want to share on facebook.
Hi Scott,
I completely agree with you and this was the first thing that came into my mind. Sorry to dis-agree with you Larry. Rand also did a WBF on click bait. He mentioned few examples in those too in his WBF session. Also, there was a huge twitter conversation between Barry and Rand over click bait (sorry for mentioning it here).
I agree that you might have achieved the said percentage of CTR, but as Rand says, "Correlation is not causation". It might be some other factors or some user search queries which Google would have identified your article good enough to rank better than earlier one.
I would also like to mention the quality attribute "EAT (Expertise, Authoritative & Trustworthy). If we meet these in any content it would surely rank better and will have better user engagement. Long clicks are no doubt the game winner, but focusing on just being click worthy shouldn't be the goal. Hope this makes sense. What do you think?
That is an interesting question you raised, I think the question we should be asking ourselves is: could you find an attractive title which is interesting enough but not too sensationalist? I agree with the idea that some titles that look too attractive could be seen as not very serious but nobody can disagree with the idea that attractive titles attract more people. So if we could get to the middle of those ideas we would get a stronger and attractive title that would bring us both quality visits and conversions.
i re-iterate, i disagree with the characterization of the optimized title as sensational click bait as the engagement metrics are remarkably strong (+30 minutes time on site) and are converting like crazy. provided that dwell time / task completion rates are remarkably high, just say no to low CTR.
It very however by an large it is the same way as it been discrible by Larry. Moreover, i beleive this also depend on in which industry you're dealing in. In some case, it has to be click baits in some stress would be on brand.
Hi, Larry. If possible, can you share the example of queries, which were used in this analysis. How many keywords did this article rank for on the first page and how did the CTR change for each query? Did it drop for some of them after changing the title? How the positions changed in general? Did you start ranking for new, noteworthy keywords?
Count me in, following this question. Larry, was your CTR affected in any way after you had changed odds and ends in your article?
Larry, under the headline "The search for RankBrain [New Data]", could you please explain the data a bit more?
Is this desktop? worldwide? Are you factoring in AMP or rich results? How many keywords, how many websites?
the data is from google search console. one website, 1000 keywords (essentially same keywords) for the periods indicated. this was intentional because stuff gets murky if you combine data from different verticals with different SERP layouts. the data in this chart has no filters applied. For this particular site, the desktop/mobile split remained at 78%/22% for the entire time range.
Weird, I don't see it in the post. Thanks for providing the data anyhow.
Hi Larry,
I had discussed via comments with Rand on that post about Quora being the best example for how we can optimize for RankBrain.
What's your take?
Regards,
Vijay
i have no idea what you are talking about.
Hi everyone. my question is: are you seeing similar things in your website CTR data? Have you started with headline CTR optimization? If so, how are things going? if not, why the heck not?
Hi Larry, thank you for all your articles about CTR optimization.
When you give CTR figures and draw graphics, do you compute CTR by pages or by queries? In Search Console, you can have the CTR for one particular query or for one particular URL. Same thing for average position.
for this particular analysis i was using queries (which would correspond to a specific URL). unfortunately we're limited by the amount of organic CTR data provided to us by Google.
Yep I've tested this theory out and have seen the same thing -- higher CTR has lead to higher rankings/more traffic. I have seen this not only with headline tweaks but also minor changes to phrasing in the blog copy -- changing phrasing to more closely align with long-tail searches related to the topic.
I have only tested this out on a handful of pages so far, but rankings definitely seem to have increased on those pages that have been optimized for CTR using some tips from Backlinko as well as Larry's previous post.
Traffic on these pages hasn't shifted significantly but they are not yet in positions 1-3 so we will see when we get to that point.
Interesting note about the phrasing in the on-page copy, which could increase overall user engagement (time on site). I would like to compare a TL;DR section at the bottom of certain pages vs not having a short summary and see how that would impact engagement with pages as well.
thank you for sharing your experiments. good job!
Well i dont doubt it higher CTR has impact on ranking. How could heading can matter for non-transectional base sites. ??
Hi Larry
Of course ... I think one of the most important parameters that Google is the commitment values (CTR) of the user. A commitment that we as a brand and as SEOs must generate
Awesome Post Larry .
i really want to say thank for sharing great information and ideas related to rankbrain.
thanks dilip and welcome aboard the USS unicorn!
Interesting read. Thanks!
Let's not discriminate against donkeys just because Google may have a penchant for Unicorns. Every donkey has his heyday and every unicorn his payday. Apart from that, it's a nice article :)
ha ha. unfortunately the USS Donkey was destroyed by the Borg at Wolf 357. all hands lost!
8/10 on this articles information.
10/10 on this articles use of Star Trek.
Thanks, human.
Im looking forward to experiment in with this on a few titles. it's interesting to see the resistance to this concept in these comments.
yes. so defensive. Why not just try it out and see for yourself. (duh!)
So, you're saying that you changed a title, then the click-through got higher, and, as a result, the ranking improved.
Could it be the other way around?
You changed a title, then the ranking improved, and, as a result, the click-through rate got higher.
Makes sense to me...
In this example, i picked a "before" and "after" headline that was near identical -- if you look at the words being used they're nearly the same - we're mostly just changing the ordering of the words to make it more catchy. take a look:
See how the bold words haven't changed? That's why i think this has more to do with CTR lift than the the part of google's algo that looks at keywords in the headline to determine headline relevancy. Well, that combined with the fact this across a broad portfolio of keywords (that was just one example), as described in the beginning part of the article.
Zhivko asks a good question - did the ranking change once Google had acknowledged the new title and could the increase in CTR be down to a higher ranking due to that change before any engagement data is taken into account? It's a critical question, really.
Could be. I am still not convinced, though. I think even such a "slight" change in the title wording can have the described effect on the rankings. And then the higher click-through could be just a result, rather than the cause.
Anyway, It is an interesting theory and I will keep an eye on this in my work. If you're right, we'll start seeing a lot of click-bait titles in SERP. :)
Or... Could it even be that the improvement granted was based on an expected increase in CTR?
So, Google (RankBrain) sees a title style it believes is more attractive. Combines that with expectation that the content will be found to be a great answer (based on other signals). And adjusts ranking.
To the point raised though - it's hard to measure impact of change it title vs. change in CTR - as soon as the title changed the CTR would have started to improve (in theory). So unless Google made instant adjustment based on change in title tag alone, data merges.
(it is a really close title tag though, so can see how Larry tried to account for this)
thanks. we have tons of examples where the titles varied wildly and saw spectacular results. this really was the most insignificant title change from a string parsing perspective. the primary and supporting keywords were unchanged.
Hey Larry,
Thanks for posting.
Whilst it's fantastic to see that CTR metrics have a close correlation to search engine rankings, are we sure that this is all that's at play here?
CTR rate is a strong indication of an eye catching & relevant result but its hard to tie this back to user engagement. Is there something deeper going on here with Google understanding not only CTR but also the behaviour of the user once they reach the destination site? As far as I know, they use CTR and 'pogo sticking' to determine search result relevancy but surely there's going to come a time when average session duration's and more realistic engagement metrics will have to be taken into account.
HI Sean, yes definitely engagement metrics like Dwell Time (aka "pogo sticking") play a role. If you look at the google analytics screenshot in the article for the page, you'll see that the time on page was 31 minutes and 48 seconds on average (very long dwell time!). I'm certain that the combination of high CTR and long dwell time is helping. For more information, see this story on how engagement rates like dwell time, bounce rate (etc.) impact rankings.
Live long and prosper, Larry Kim.
Hi from Spain guys!
My personal thinking is that Google more and more it's trying to reach de big data and probability science to a new level, you know, that kind of things are simply probability dispersion, but made dinamically and with tons of data!
What do you think about it?
Interesting stuff. There will be more and more as time goes by but I think the need for non automated curation will always present an opportunity.
And I love the start trek pics. Warp speed my friend.
I thought it was hard to make websites for AMP... - Thanks for the great post!
Hi Larry,
Thanks for the post, it's very interesting and i'm definitely going to follow your instructions on my website https://phoenixinfomedia.in/. Keep updating.
Thats good perspective presented with data ! The fact that CTR trumps a safe title tag with keyword optimisation is quite important to understand given the higher weightage of CTR as a resulted of AI algorithms seems to be something every SEO has to be aware of !
Thanks for your appreciation. It really motivates me :-)
Stay connected for more updates.
Good information on RankBrain. Thanks @Larry Kim
I'm Samuel Scott agree I agree that many vendors are only based on short-term results, when we know that digital businesses are profitable in the long term, we should not desesperarce for wanting to do things fast, it is better to go forward to short term doing things right
Awesome! Really appreciate this thorough piece Larry. Most SEOs pay little to no attention to the powerful practice CTR optimization. It's probably one of the most overlooked practices in the SEO world.
amen. that's exactly my point. huge leverage. very little effort. great outcomes. good luck!
Will be interesting to see more and more RankBrain data come to light. I think there is a lot we don't know and a lot of 'results' we associate with it that aren't really a determining factor of RankBrain at all.
I know earlier this year the DM team talked a lot about rankings increases from simple updates to old blog posts. Adding a few more images, changing up some links, even adding more content...all showed rankings increases across the board. Even on posts a year or more.
Not sure if it has anything to do with RankBrain...but almost wonder if simply changing a title is related. Either way...good post and I think optimizing titles for higher CTR is always a good thing!
there's another way to test this out. what you do is edit meta descriptions. we know that google doesn't use meta tags for ranking purposes, but they often do show up in serp snippets. so, if a ranking change happens as a result of having more catchy meta descriptions, we can reasonably conclude that the CTR is impacting rank. (spoiler alert: I've actually already done this experiment - CTR matters - and will publish soon.) - but i encourage you to try it out yourself.
Hi Larry - interesting hypothesis, but not enough data here to support your conclusion. One could just as easily have taken the same "experiment" and come to the conclusion that Rainkbrain likes shorter titles. When you shortened the title from
Guerrilla Marketing: 20+ Examples and Strategies to Stand Out
To
20+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples
You saw an improvement in rankings, traffic and CTR. Therefore, Rankbrain rewards shorter titles ~ or titles of a certain length ~ or liked the connection between jaws and Guerillas ~ or ...
pretty sure that's not what's going on here.
Hi Chuck...seems like you got confuse yourself here.
No confusion - my point is that any number of correlations could be drawn from this data
what about the thousand keywords at the beginning of the story and how average CTRs for any given position is going up. what could be causing the bending of that curve this year?
Hey Larry.. yeah.. so of course Google is tracking CTR and user engagement metrics for a long time now without really telling us (or the baseline data for the AI would not work ... ie. if they told us then the SEOs would go in and screw up the seed data that the RankBrain needs).
You need to note that... this is only an interim stage until true AI is achieved through deep learning.. once thats done for each niche and micro-niche.. the AI / google wont need to track any engagement metrics etc. as it will know what is good/bad by looking at it and matching patterns.
Thats good and bad.
Good cause, we can obviously crack it easily using another deep learning algo that simply scans the top 10 and say bottom 10 (90 to 100) result and builds a data pattern.
Bad, cause we dont have we don't (yet) have access to is the average baseline metrics for the engagement.. but folks like similarweb could in theory get that data.. or a similar service like alexa or another browser.. and if they open source that data .. then bye bye to rank brain as we can break it then. So, yeah they're up a few steps now.. but lets see how long? And there are many other factors that RankBrain is looking at.. i discussed all these factors including what you're talking about (CTR/bounce backs/engagemtn etc) in my video that I put out about 4 months ago on my blog here.. (if anyone wants to get to it) SEO in 2016...
a bunch of people have the view that AI is ridiculously impossible to crack and so don't even bother. I disagree. read: Stealing an AI algorithm and its underlying data is a “high-school level exercise”
Hi Larry,
Thanks for the post. just wondering if you could briefly respond here to the main criticism seen elsewhere of your "CTR/RankBrain" theory - that CTR is never going to be a big ranking factor, as it is too easy to game?
there are thousands if not more digital fingerprints that google can use to determine if a click is real or fake. it's not as easy as you think. they've been developing anti-click fraud technology for over 15 years because the entire adwords network must be safeguarded from fradulent clicks (advertisers trying to drain competitor budgets, publishers clicking on their own ads to increase revenues, etc.) there are literally tens of billions of dollars at stake here, yet google's entire ad targeting/pricing engine is based on CTR - that should tell you something.
Thanks Larry
I would also like to get the example of queries.
Hi, i'm not going to post all of the queries this site ranks for. (Transparency is not a suicide pact). but the steps to reproduce these results are in the story and you can try it out yourself today.
Hi Larry,
I really like your post, and this strategy. However, I always have trouble accurately measuring CTR for organic traffic. With rankings fluctuating all the time, how can we be certain that a change we made on our end, was the cause of an increase or decrease of CTR? If you start to rank higher for a keyword, your CTR will go up as well more than likely. Do you have any suggestions or strategies that you use to accurately measure CTR? Thanks for the help!
hi chris, check out this guide on calculating CTR and optimizing them. it's also available in a visual graphic here (similar content, but illustrated)
Great, thank you Larry!
Hi Larry. Great blog! Thank you. Do you know if there any link between PPC CTR and organic ranking? In other words if a website has a brand PPC with a high CTR, can this have any impact on organic search?
they're related. But not as directly as you suggest. Searchers overwhelmingly click on the search listing of the brands they know and love. Higher brand affinity (which can be influenced by advertising) impacts CTR, which impacts SEO
Larry, in my opinion RankBrain has nothing to do with CTR at all. Moving the number at the beginning of the title was a well-known strategy of many internet marketers for lis type of articles ("listicles"), before RankBrain. Ryan Deiss was mentioning engagement metrics at Traffic and Conversion Summit in February 2015. Google confirmed that they are using RankBrain on 26 October 2015.
What RankBrain does is that it uses neural network(s) which work similar to human brain. A neural network consists of many perceptrons (similar to neurons in human brain). So all the ranking signals, links, content, engagement, CTR, etc go to the first layer the neural network first, with a certain weight assigned to it, and each perceptron either activates or not. Depending on that the signals proceed to the 2nd and further to the nth layers of the neural networks. No data scientist understands what's going on in further after the first layer, in the hidden layer(s). Then, after the processing all the information, a neural network outputs the result, which is the position of a particular website in Google Search results.
More info: https://www.tensorflow.org
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Googl...
https://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/
RankBrain is not a typical Google Algorithm. To reverse engineer it is similar to reverse engineering human's brain. That's why they are saying that you cannot optimize for it. Thus, the best approach IMHO would be to pursue the creation of 10x content.
thanks for this comment. i don't understand why you and so many others here wouldn't just try this out for yourself and see how great it is. the steps to reproduce have been clearly explained. It will literally take you a few minutes to implement. Data > Theory.
Most impressive (although I think Darth Vader would have made a better meme).
I'm wondering if you have any more data than the single example. I'm going to have a look at testing for my clients as well.
hi davey, for the sake of having a shorter post, i only included one example. but i'm certain that this works in general. (we've tried it out on a ton of content).
Thanks Larry, I'm going to experiment with some of my more boring clients. I just need to think of some catchy titles around laminating sheets...
Being in a boring industry means you have a huge opportunity to be less boring then all the other boring companies in the industry!
:) Check out this Guide to CTR optimization for some inspiration.
But, this is the post you changed: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/09/22/guerr...
It has a date on it of September 27th 2016... How do you know it wasn't that?
Even if the date on the post hadn't changed, couldn't the fact that Google saw it had been updated (there's a new title) be enough to signify that it was newer and worth a
Lastly you say there was a higher CTR, and *then* ranking improved, how do you know that the ranking didn't improve first, which then gave you a higher CTR?
Cheers
the date range for the analysis was July 1 - end of September.
it's absolutely true that historically speaking on-page optimizations have led to increased rankings which increases CTR. But increasingly, the opposite is happening. Machine Learning, by definition, creates a feedback loop wherein outputs (engagement signals) are used as inputs for future rankings. Effect is the new cause, in a sense.
One of the best things to improve the CTR is the Rich Snippets, try to put the typical stars in your blog articles and you´ll improve a lot your CTR.
Yazarki Thank you perfect ..
It is good for me. Thank you
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