To say I was bowled over when Martin MacDonald of OMD showed the results of his testing on query volume influencing rankings (not just auto-suggest, but actual positions) would be an understatement. Anyone who saw me listening to him at Mozcon knows I was flabbergasted. But, as is typical in the SEO world, I wanted to test it for myself.

Caveat: This is one test, performed not particularly scientifically and without a control group, formal methodology, etc. All that said, I think you'll still find the results fascinating and, hopefully, it will inspire others to run tests of their own.

My goal was to see if I could move the rankings for a particular site through search volume and clicks. I started with my wife's travel blog, Everywhereist, since she refuses to do SEO and generally sees very little fluctuation in terms of search engine rankings (in fact, non-branded search is less than 10% of her traffic). I also picked it because I could look at the analytics and publicly share all the findings.

The results are in the slide presentation below (which I thought would be a better format than scrolling through dozens of images and screenshots).

My general takeaway from this process is that the query volume seemed not to have any impact on the broad query "travel blog" (which, granted, is hyper-competitive), but it's plausible that clickthrough rate or maybe search volume influenced the rankings of the site itself in the "travel blog everywhereist" results.

I was, however, really shocked to see the engagement and clickthrough from Google+. Given that I have, currently, 12,570 followers on Google+ and 39,969 on Twitter, and given that Twitter is a much more popular service (I thought) from a login/participation perspective, I'm amazed that Google+ drove just over 50% of the clicks as Twitter over the same timespan. Note that I shared the URL in two posts/updates on each service, nearly simultaneous to one another. This was an unexpected, but fascinating result for me and I hope to dig in more in the future. Perhaps Google's really onto something :-)

Looking forward to seeing your perceptions, analyses and experiments on this front, too!