If you are a wholesale supplier or distributor, you know the importance of page 1 rankings on wholesale search engines. However, it can be hard to rank organically because you can’t pay for top natural rankings. The only way to get to the top organic positions is by optimizing your content with selected keywords. While this can be time consuming, it is also challenging to select the right keywords.
Now, there’s an easier way to select your organic keywords which involves running a pay-per-click campaign first and then analyzing paid search CTR. A new study by marketing software company Optify shows that you can increase your organic listings by using your cheaper paid search terms! Yep, your cheaper terms lead to higher organic clickthrough rates.
The study was conducted using AdWords terms and addressed the following questions:
1. Given the recent changes to SERPs, what is the new CTR curve for organic results?
2. Is there a correlation between organic click through rate and CPC value for the same keyword?
3. What is the effect of search volume on click-through-rates?
These findings suggest you can get better organic results by analyzing the value of the keywords used in your Google AdWords campaign and then using your average paid search CPC to determine the CTR of future organic campaigns.
The study analyzed expensive terms (>$1.50 per click) and cheaper terms (<$0.25 per click) for Google advertisers to determine the impact on the CTR of organic listings. Low-cost PPC terms subsequently used in organic campaigns got a higher CTR for page 1 Google results (87.5%) than High-cost terms (37.3%). If these results generalize to wholesale search engines, it means you can get better organic results using low-cost paid search terms.
The study further revealed the correlation between the cheaper terms and the average rank 1 CTR for organic results was 31.8 percent. Conversely, this correlation for expensive terms was only 17.1 percent. The disparity in correlation between cheap vs. expensive terms increases as the organic rankings decrease to rank 2, where it more than triples (13.8% for cheap terms vs. 4.3% for expensive terms).
The chart below shows the average organic CTR on Google page 1 results by keyword cost and rank (U.S. based searches). Although CTR often leads to increased website traffic, the study cautions against making this assumption and suggests marketers estimate potential traffic gains for each keyword to achieve optimal results.
Download the study here: http://www.optify.net/guides/organic-click-through-rate-curve
