Improve Your Performance in Google with the New Search Success Score

The new Search Success Score shows you the status of your website’s performance in Google. The metric is based on click through rate and rankings to give you an excellent gauge of your website’s performance in Google. In this article, we explain how the score is calculated, and how you can use it for optimizing your website, and tracking progress of your optimization measures.

What is the Search Success Score?

The Search Success Score shows you the status of your website’s performance in Google. It is based on two metrics, the "Ranking Score" and the "User Engagement Score", which are based on click-through rate and position. You can find the SES Score in the navigation in "Monitoring" under "Overview".

Figure 1: Search Success Score

User Engagement Score

The User Engagement Score is based on CTR. It takes into account all of your keywords that are imported into your Ryte project from the Google Search Console. The User Engagement Score then shows the average CTR of your keywords over a 7-day period relative to other websites on the web. If the average CTR of all keywords of all projects is 4%, and the average CTR of all of your keywords is also 4%, your score will be around 50%. If your score is 60%, this means you are in the best 60%.

Ranking score

The ranking score is calculated in the same way as the user engagement score, but using ranking position instead of CTR. If your score here is around 50%, this means that your average position is roughly equal to the average ranking position of other websites out there. Like the user engagement score, all keywords that can be found in the Keyword Report (i.e. all keywords that are imported from the Google Search Console) are used for the calculation of the score.

The overall Search Success Score is the average of the User Engagement and Ranking Scores.

Figure 2: User Engagement and Ranking Score

How can I use the Search Success Score for my website optimizations?

The Search Success Score provides you with endless possibilities for deriving optimization measures and for tracking progress.

Don’t be demoralised if your score seems low! The majority of scores are between 30 and 70%, and it is difficult to reach a score above 70. However, if your Search Success score is between 30 and 60, there is plenty of potential for improvement.

Some low hanging fruits to achieve a better score:

• As the value is an average of all keywords’ CTR and position, you might have lots of old content that is not ranking at all, and gaining very few clicks. Update or delete old content to get rid of the stuff that is no longer visible in Google.

• Improve your meta titles and descriptions, particularly for content that gains impressions, but few clicks. Encourage your readers to click on your content!

• Check that your website is functioning technically - for example fast page speed, and good mobile usability to avoid people bouncing back to the search results. (Ryte Website Success can help you with this)

Use the Search Success Score score to track progress

The Search Success Score is a great way of tracking the search performance of your whole domain, rather than just the keywords you have in keyword monitoring. The score is calculated based on all of your keywords, so you’ll be able to keep an eye on the bulk of keywords that may not be vital enough to monitor individually, but still provide your website with valuable traffic.

Above all, the Search Success Score makes it easy to track the progress of your optimization measures, as you will see an increase in your score if you optimize your website and content regularly. Whether you start with a score of 30 or with 60, showing an improvement over time will help demonstrate to customers or your bosses the success of your optimization measures.

The Search Success Score could also be included in your regular KPI reporting to clearly show the development of your brand in Google.

Conclusion

Make your life easier with Ryte’s new Search Success Score! Let this metric do your reporting for you - just make sure you optimize your website and content regularly, and the score will demonstrate your progress.