Search is all about working the long tail, right? Well not if Google has it’s way. Since Google makes a lower CPC on ads clicked from long tail searches, they’re keen to reduce it – as this fantastic infographic from SEOBook illustrates:
Google have updated their organic ranking algorithm so that the organic Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) sometimes displays multiple results from the same website.
Previously Google would only display different websites for every entry in the SERPs. Then a few months ago they decided to add more results from the same website when they were ‘confident that those results are likely to be most useful to you’.
And from this week that feature has been enhanced and expanded to include a wider range of queries, and to also include up to four results from the same website:
If your website is well optimised for your own brand searches then this is good news. Any affiliates, negative results or arbitrage sites trading on your brand will be pushed down the results pages.
And if you’re not well optimised for brand? Time to do that! SEO programs often leave brand searches out, in the expectation that a business should always rank highly for its own brand searches. But this is not always the case, a gap that affiliates and others have exploited to grab clicks.
Blanket coverage for your own brand can usually be achieved by optimising the Meta data of your website, so this is easily fixed. Get in touch to find out about our onsite SEO service.
Like Google Instant, this update may force you to focus to an even greater extent on the head terms. Whilst these high traffic monsters are often the early focus of your SEO process, once you achieve top ranking status they tend to get ignored as the SEO team move on towards the tail.
This update means that if you continue to focus on head terms, and optimising multiple clustered pages around variations of them, then your site has a strong chance to take not just top rank but 2, 3 and 4 as well.
And top-blocking the highest traffic searches in your market is a double whammy. Your Click Through Rate on those terms may go from 10% to nearer 40% – so you get as much traffic from that term as almost your whole long tail. And you also block out your competitors, having the satisfaction of seeing your performance pull away from the crowd.
There are only so many hours in the day – and so much budget for SEO. This might be time to refocus your long tail efforts back to head terms for a couple of months. Something has to give, and it’s worth putting effort back into the head to see how it pays off.
Multiple results from the same site is a modest update, but one which may have significant effects on your SEO. For help on how to exploit this update, get in touch.
