Relevancy is the key goal for search results. Relevant results are clickable results. When you have relevant results, your visitors are looking at what’s presented to them and they think “it’s like you read my mind”.
A relevant result is one that is a balance of the right choice and the obvious choice. As someone looking after a search engine you know the result present is the right one. Your visitor knows it’s an obvious one.
In its most basic sense, relevancy is measured by click through rates (CTR). However, if your site is an e-commerce site, a better measure is conversion rate (CVR) and CTR combined.
A human determines a relevant result by a number of factors.
An example
A page has a 97% click through rate and an average click position of 1.
The query being used is matched word for word in the same sequence but appended with a very clear call to action.
The meta description below it includes a concise description of what this service is.
Don’t assume that just because there are two results this is why it’s performing so well. You could have a single result that matches the query but the title or description does not reflect the query and people will not click on it.
The field of dreams paradox
From the line in the film Field of Dreams where the main character is told by a ghost "if you build it, they will come". Admittedly you are not building a baseball field in the middle of a corn field.
Building a curated result is absolutely no guarantee that your visitors will click on the results you’ve given them.
The results you present to your users must be relevant to their needs. To ensure this you should avoid the following:
- False promises - don’t push promotions for things that bare no relevance to what your visitor has searched for
- Advertising - Google were forced to add “advertising” to promoted links because people and regulators got angry that they were being advertised to without being told they were. Advertising in search results will often get ignored if it’s irrelevant to the search being carried out.
- Sniffing a rat - if your results are 100% curated and in such a way that seems like the query has been manipulated it can easily impact click through rates. This is usually because the title and meta description bare no resemblance to what was searched for.
