I thought this may interest any website owners and seo’s out and about..
I run a sort of social network of products of which members submit and vote, you know sort of like digg..
On this site you can’t submit anything without an image so the site is 100% image heavy.
The niche of the site isn’t important but it’s not adult type of images but products for sale.
Google doesn’t really rank the pages that well but ranks the images amazingly well. Many searches return images at the top of the google main web serps and this site is in many of those top3 or top5 images being pulled into the web search (universal search).
Anyway CTR (click through rate) is what I find interesting with search a heavy imaged site.
Info about the site: google crawl 7,000 pages per day on Avg, site has 100,000’s pages (site command = 108,000) with 29,136,640 backlinks.
Here is the screen shot from google webmaster tools for images searches over 1 month:
image-heavy-website-stats
Yes GWT isn’t perfect but I hope this will give you an idea. So looking at the last month’s worth of data 11,000,000 Impression vs only 50,000 clicks from images results. Now of course this does include direct image search and not just the universal image triggered in the main web serps.
A bit of maths then… The above shows a CTR of just 0.004545%
So what can you expect from a image heavy site and a google CTR, well half a % of people are likely to click so when doing your keyword research it’s worth keeping in mind.. Of course the niche of the site can effect things. In terms of this site it ranks for images searched in “general” terms with many images for the query with google returning a great selection of images of which my site suits but is no better or worse than what other sites offer.
The clicks come from a person liking the images more than the ones around it BUT it’s a personal choice 100% hence a interesting and ground case study in my opinion.
Hope it interest some 🙂
