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About the Author
Neil Walker is the founder of SEO at Just Search Ltd who rank on the 1st page of Google UK for "SEO". He has over 7 years experience and dealt with over 2500 clients SEO over the years. He has only started to proactively blog in the past 4 months by running "SEO Mad" - He hopes you find it interesting. 
Pretty good article, blending disclosure of some data with the methodology you used to perform your analysis. Other people can follow your model to see if they realize similar results.
I think if you decide to do an analysis of data from other search sources, you should break it out by search source as well as aggregate it. You may notice very different trends and the keyword selections may reveal some interesting demographics.
Very good information, i am surprised no one has responded to the post. In my own practice i also the .org very well represented just based on domains. Also yahoo i think gives most value to .org domain in my exeprience.
Neil,
Good post but i think you need to do the tld experiment on a larger scale to get a reliable set of results.
Interesting article. I always had the feeling that .org domains where the second best after .edu but I never had significant data. Thanks for sharing
I enjoy this subject and through my own research came to the conclusion that different extensions affect the rankings in different circumstances. For content based sites an org would help but for commerce or service a com is preffered.
Heard your presentation at Mini Conference, was very pleased that it matched what we’ve been doing (though your had much greater detail) and SO glad you’ve done this blog post so we can pad out our theories with yours!
Much appreciated.
good article, I find some of the training tools on the majestic site a bit lacking, but maybe thats becasue I’ve only just started using them!
Hey Neil, awesome post! Thanks for sharing. How accurate do you think the Google Keyword Tool is for estimating search traffic (with exact match)? Also would you be willing to share the excel file? In any case, great analysis..
Jim
Hi Jim, The Google keyword tool isn't 100% accurate I've seen phrases with 0 searches in the tool and then a website see thousands of hit from that search term, however the other search volume tools are not Google, I will say that I would generally give a 10-20% change on what figure they give you.
Hi Neil, thanks for the great info! First time at your blog and I will definitely be back!
The problem with using robots.txt is that it’s up to the person scraping your site to respect it. Phil is wrong in using the word “blocks” in regards to your robots.txt file. Luckily no site gets big enough to matter and then dares to disobey robots.txt that I know of. The problem with blocking IP address is that they change–this means you could be blocking someone in the future unintentionally as well as not blocking the new IPs the scraper may have taken. Also, if a crawler sees a robots.txt file that disallows it (which can’t happen if you’re blocking the IP), it usually takes that to mean “remove me from your site” which is what most people want anyway.
Given the current environment and sense of fair play, robots.txt is definitely the better choice.
Thanks for the great info, being fairly new at this, I didn’t know how MagesticSEO related to my website about home system integration. Thanks!
Funny but informative post! keep up the good work mate, hope to see you soon : )
What a time to read this article. I am about to book 10 different domains for my client with various tlds.
I believe this analysis is based on “All other factors being equal” Just wondering how does .us domain work for US market. I have YET to see a site rank on top which has a .us tld.
Any comments on this one.
Thanks.
very useful, thnx..!!
Hi Neil
This is great research and work and has answered a few questions but at the same time raised others for me (murphys law).
The primary question i have is regarding the keywords. My gut feel (which i never trust) is that a brand key phrase with more relevant results would have a higher click through. How many of the key phrases are brand phrases? Also the more competitive the phrase the greater the “noise” how many of the phrases have a full compliment of PPC adverts.
This is obviously the start but i am sure will facilitate discussion.
A very good synthesis of available information combined with -real customer data-. The latter is what makes this so credible. The CTR vs Query Length also informative. Thanks. On to your next article….
Interesting to see from this post how some of the companies market under SEO and others Search Engine Optimisation
Good to see in a chart to who and where the companies are
Great information. It really helps to calculate ROI. I was interested in the chart element: Grand Total = 20%. What does that refer to?
Also, you mention that being on the first page was worth an average of 4.85% of total CTR. How did you get that number? It seems that the lowest position is around 7%
Thanks again for the information.
I have the SEOBook toolbar which shows MJ Seo links but it states my website (domain) has 2k MJSEO page links and yet when I go into Majestic, it shows I have 2. What is the 2k supposed to suggest?? I’m a bit confused. It (the toolbar) also shows 187 domains linking to the root domain. Can you please clarify these two points? Many thanks
This is some awesome work Neil! Some great info about CTR, keep up the good work.
Hi Neil
I very much appreciate the time and effort you have put into the collation of this data. Its now April 2011 and the same data is fed to me through various sources. A credit to you for your efforts.
I too am an SEO Internet Marketing specialist and no consideration has gone into the dynamics of the visual look of the returned search. For example does a listing fully populated with characters have more or less appeal to the eye? What causes the eye to stretch across the page and settle on something appealing.
Figures for position 1 ,2 and possibly 3 can demonstrate one piece of reasoning but it fails to take into account that the eye responds to the site of the order on the page. It gets drawn to the irregular, distracting the order of the mind. I think we now need to take advantage of the display text to capture the eye’s weak tendency too.
A thoroughly good read, I was brought to you from Mark R in Warrior Forum
We are in interesting times for Web Traffic Generation.
Thank you once again
Tim
Ha, good idea pal, best version of Black and Yellow I’ve heard yet!
A lot of the data we build from monitoring our website is recorded and placed in to an excel document. On the whole it is perfect for representing what the website is doing in black and white and in a straight to the point way.
Nice article – thank you for the detailed info… I will use these stats in my presentation tomorrow and credit your site for it. Cheers Flo
Hey Neil
Thanks for putting a considerable amount of time into this post! It was fascinating to read.
I am often discussing the number of clicks throughs a website will receive for their position on page 1 with clients starting new businesses or beginning an SEO strategy.
Cheers
Mark
Great analysis. The one thing I think not being considered are the additional results that often compete for clicks on the page i.e. news results, local results, shopping results. In my tests I have found that an assumption of 60% of the clicks going to organic results (one through ten) is more accurate.
We have always found that compared to all our sister websites, the .com site has been easiest to optimise and google has ranked it much more effectively within the time scales we are mentioning here.This is very interesting to read up to say the very least!