It’s coming to the end of the academic year and I’ve got results on my mind, so when a colleague forwarded to me a copy of Conductor’s report on Natural Search Trends of the Internet Retailer 500 Q2/2010 (full of statistics and grades) I immediately got excited.

You can get your copy of the report here.

It’s well worth picking up and certainly contains some food for thought (and much that I agree with) but parts of it left me baffled, particularly its grading system.

The report grades retailers according to the following Search Visibility Score (drum roll please):

A – Highest keyword visibility – keyword ranks in the top 30 returned search results
B – Some keyword visibility – keyword ranks from 30 to 50
C – Low keyword visibility – keyword ranks from 50 to 75
D – Very low keyword visibility – keywords ranks from 75 to 100
F – No keyword visibility – keyword ranks 100+

I don’t know what your thinking is when it comes to keyword visibility but I’m not sure how you can justify handing out a grade A for returns on page three. Heck, I’m not even sure you should be handing out a grade A for keywords “below the fold” on page one…

Click-thru rates are a movable feast; you might remember the AOL statistics for CTRs for natural search that have been bandied around a lot over the past few years:

Position 1 – 42%
Position 2 – 12%
Position 3 – 9%
Position 4 – 6%
Position 5 – 5%

That was 74% of the clicks gone on the top five and by the time you’d reached the bottom of page one 89% of the clicks would have passed you by.

Those statistics are getting a bit long in the tooth and based on our experience of working with retailers selling products in diverse markets (and supported by data from Webmaster Tools) these days position 1 will, on average, get you something like 18% to 25%, position 2 from 11% to 15%, position 3 from 10% to 13%, position 4 from 7% to 12% and position 5 from 4% to 8% (having said that, the validity of any such data is probably deserving of its own blog post).

While these figures are not quite as skewed as the AOL figures, positions 1-5 are still going to take 50% - 73% of the clicks.

Simply put, for non-brand natural search, page one is where it’s at and, realistically, it’s positions five and above that are going to drive significant business. You can assign your own grades based on whatever data you like but I can’t envisage a marking scheme that doesn’t reflect the importance of a return on page one.

I’m reminded of the famous quote: “First is first and second is nowhere.”

Third isn’t even mentioned.

An alternative (and potentially much more useful) marking scheme might focus more on the opportunities for positional improvements based on current positions and an analysis of where competitors are and how they’ve got there.

I know retailers that have gone from 100+ to 1 in a year for keywords with clear revenue potential (that’s an A* in my book). In other situations they’ve steered away from focusing on already high ranking keywords because the scope for improvement is limited (perhaps a B or a C).

Of course, the situation is getting far more complex than a simple numbers game, particularly as ideas such as universal search come more to the fore.

Take a look at the results for this search for what to wear for a summer wedding

Where are you going to click? I’m willing to bet that the video (despite its average rating) is going to pick up a disproportionately high number of clicks. Even if it was towards the bottom of the page I reckon it would outperform many of the listings above it. The status quo (not the band) is clearly changing and savvy brands should be taking advantage of this now.

[If you want more information on using universal search to drive business I’ll be posting something on this blog next week]

As ideas such as universal search come to the fore it should mean that qualitative factors become more and more relevant to SEO strategies. This can only be a good thing - position 1 might not always be achievable (think Wikipedia) but a slightly lower position might be – and could be made more attractive to customers by putting them first and using content in a compelling way.

This brings us to another idea…

Perhaps the most important idea of all…

If you’re thinking about content you absolutely need to think about your customers.

Optimising for search engines is absolutely necessary as a first step but optimising for your customers represents the biggest opportunity for brands moving forward. If you don’t think about your customers and the search journeys they make you’ve got very little chance of achieving the never-ending advocacy that’s increasingly going to drive business.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the idea of the long tail but you need to put the customer (and not the keyword) first and think about how they use Google as an information gateway for searches that can range from what to wear for a summer wedding to size 12 oriental maxi dresses for tall women through various broad and specific product and brand permutations. Only by doing this will you find the best ways to engage them. And if you do this you will maximise potential revenue.

So, in a nutshell:

• Let’s be honest, you need to be as high on the first page as possible for your revenue generating keywords.
• Don’t focus on where you are – focus on where you can get to and how feasible getting there is;
• Think about ways to maximise the CTR for any given keyword using persona insight and compelling content; and
• Don’t just think about keywords – think about your customers, the journeys they make and the opportunity to make them advocates

Oh, and one last thing, checking the webinar presentation that went with the report I was struck by the following statement:

“CMOs are excited by the potential of SEO but extremely frustrated by the lack of accountability and ability to measure ROI!”

For everything I’ve mentioned the ROI should be measurable. I’ll be blogging further details about SEO and ROI within the next couple of weeks.