Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, after looking at the click through rates for organic search last week, we thought we would follow this up and consider does Google’s universal search results effect CTR and is an image or video more desirable to click for a user.

You can see a typical example of a results page that incorporates universal search. The results page includes both images and video thumbnails.

Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden, user experience researchers from Google produced a blog post last year which discussed what effect having other mediums appearing in your search results had on you finding a suitable result.

The results suggested that a user can scan an image or video thumbnail to see if it is appropriate to their search query faster and more easily then a traditional text based result.

You can see from the image that Google designed a interface that gave users information in a variation of mediums with out effecting their primary task, finding relevant information relating to the original query.

The density of the red dots also governs the time that the users eyes spend looking at a particular point, in the example shown you can see that if the thumbnail isn’t relevant it is easy for the user to skim over and find the result below it.

So what does this mean for the organic search results for your clients?, should we be optimising for universal search with a wide range of media?

We believe that having multiple listings in the search result maximizes the opportunity of getting traffic. You can see that if you Google last weeks video blog ‘Click Through Rate SEO Video Blog’ a thumbnail appears in the search results for the video and a traditional organic listing, both of which link to creare comm .co.uk

Thanks for watching.

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video Blog, This week we are going to consider click through rates or CTR?

Most of the time when discussing click through rates it’s based on the information given by Google Adwords or other paid advertising services.

But, Google’s webmaster tools also has a click through rate feature which illustrates the clicks for your organic positions, when reviewing our own websites both seo-creare.co.uk and crearedesign.co.uk displayed some interesting information.

Lets have a look at the facts and figures from webmaster tools..

<Video></video>

So you can see that the difference between just one position causes a dramatic change in the click through rate.

So what does this mean to your organic SEO campaign?, well..  we all knew it was important to be in the top 3 positions to get an effective return, but this also illustrates that users are most likely to click the first listing that they see.

We believe that as the SEO industry becomes more competitive, clients are will be demanding position 1 for their websites. This also relates directly to Google’s ethos, as the algorithm increases in intelligence, the less a user will have to filter out unrelated results, finding the desired result at the top of the page.

Thanks for watching.