What?
Google retired the continuous scroll feature on both Desktop and Mobile towards the end of June.
Search results are now back to their old format and users need to scroll to the bottom of the page and click to navigate to more results on Page 2 and beyond.
Our findings
Using a 3 weeks pre vs post comparison window, we aggregated clicks across our clients, covering verticals in Ecommerce, Travel and Insurance in the UK, comparing clicks grouped by the page the queries are ranking on.
While we did expect a degree of seasonality for our Page 1 clicks, we did see a significantly greater decline for clicks coming from Page 2 and beyond – especially for Ecommerce. Page 4 has practically become non-existent.
Page 1 -7% decline
Page 2 -34% decline
Page 3 -66% decline
Page 4 -61% decline
What next?
For queries where searchers were scrolling through and clicking lower ranked results, this suggests that searchers weren’t finding what they were looking for with the top ranked listings.
For some results ranking beyond Page 1, the listings might actually perfectly match the intent of what the searcher was looking for.
- With searchers less incentivised to scroll, identify the keywords which were previously driving relevant and meaningful clicks to your website.
- From an organic POV, look for low-hanging fruit in positions 11 – 15: think quick win optimisations which involve amending H1s and page titles.
- But most importantly – for relevant queries, use this list of queries to kickstart or catch up with your PPC team.
PPC and SEO collaboration!
Bidding on these keywords is a great way to mitigate any lost conversions and retain visibility in Search – pretty much instantly!
Ultimately, this could be a great way to initiate some cross-team collaboration and establish some common ground for any trickier combined Search challenges which might arise down the line.
For more starting points on PPC and SEO collaboration, check out our guide written by Sally Poundall.
