Study: Does Google’s indented search results actually harm your business? //
Google restored indented search results towards the end of 2021. Indented search results occur when Google displays additional pages from the same domain it believes are relevant to your query. These are usually found on Page 1.
While many people may think that having two search results on Page 1 might be a positive thing, I’ll show you why.
Keyword optimization
SEO strategists optimize pages for keywords or queries. Indented search results can also show pages that you didn’t intend to be there.
What happens if a user clicks one of the results but doesn’t find what they are looking for? Google may not know which page to display, so this is a sign.
CTR is based on position
If we look at these three studies, the average click-through rate (CTR) based on Google SERP position looks like this:
|
Position |
CTR range |
| 1 | 28-40% |
| 2 | 16-18% |
| 3 | 10-11% |
| 4 | 7-8% |
| 5 | 6% or less |
Let’s suppose a website has a position 4 indented search results. The table below shows that our CTR would be approximately 14% (adding position 4 and 5 to the above).
If we could get the search result up to position 2, then our CTR would be 16-18%.
It would be best to move it up to position 1, with a CTR between 28-40%.
Google can you remove indented search results from your searches?
Yes, it is possible to get indented search results that will not appear again. The example below shows how we optimized the top page, which was at position 5.
Google began showing us an additional page indented at position 5, 6, and 7 after that.
We went back to the website and made sure that the optimization was clear. This included basic SEO techniques like internal linking.
The page that we were trying to rank rose to 4th position, and the indented search result disappeared.
What happened to their traffic?
We saw a 55% increase of their traffic to this page the month after they moved from position 5 up to position 4.
Rethinking the importance of indented search results in SEO
While some may believe that indented search results can be a positive thing for your site, I disagree.
It is crucial that the optimized page for a particular keyword be the only page on the domain that appears for the query.
A higher CTR is a benefit, but we cannot guarantee which page a user will click on if they have two options.
This is a scenario I’ve seen with many of our clients over the past few months. In all cases I have worked on, I found that removing the indented result had a positive effect on site ranking and traffic.
Case Study: Is indented Google search really hurting your business? was first published on Search Engine land.