Can EMO Improve Search Rankings?
Jan 29th, 2010 by admin
Rishi Rawat of the Retail In The Eyes of the Everyday Customer blog posted a very thought provoking idea on his blog earlier this week: Could a retailer improve its natural search rankings by asking its email subscribers to Google its most desirable keyword phrase and click on its listing in search (especially if its on the second page of results)? Rishi calls his tactic email marketing optimization or EMO (not to be confused with emo or Elmo).
Picture of Can EMO Improve Search Rankings? [source:getelastic.com]
Click through rate in natural search could be a factor in Googles secret-sauce ranking algorithm. SEOmoz estimates click through to account for 7% according to its Search Engine Ranking Factors report:
Note that SEOmoz research is based on the expert opinions of some of the worlds top SEOs, not of Google itself.
It makes sense that Google would consider click through rate as a sign of a web result being relevant to a search term. (Have you marketed yourself well in meta description tags?) Click through rates by human beings add that personal element to its computerized intelligence.
Another clue to the quality / relevance of a search result is the bounce rate, which is easy for Google to calculate the time elapsed from the click through to the click back.
A campaign such as what Rishi proposes is brilliant. His hypothetical email goes like this:
Not only does this attract click through, but encourages customers to at least browse the site for something they want (27 flavors of chocolate popcorn this I gotta see!).
Of course, the promotion could be reinforced through content spaces (banner images) throughout the site and the promo code auto-applied through targeted selling, writing a rule that all referrals from Google for the target keyword qualifies for the promotion in the cart.[source:getelastic.com]
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