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Keyword Selection Strategies in Search Engine Optimization: How Relevant

is Relevance?夽
Mayank Nagpal, J. Andrew Petersen ∗
The Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Abstract
We build an empirical framework using search queries and organic click data which provides model-based guidance to SEO practitioners for
keyword selection and web content creation. Specifically, we study how search characteristics (search query popularity, search query competition,
search query specificity, and search intent) and website characteristics (content relevance and online authority) interact to affect the expected
organic clicks as well as the organic rank a website receives from the search engine result page (SERP). It is often thought that content relevance
is a key factor to improve the effectiveness of SEO. We find, however, that content relevance is an important factor in driving organic clicks only
when the consumer is farther along in the customer journey and searching for ways to purchase a product. Whereas, when the customer is at the
awareness stage and looking for product information, online authority is the key driver of organic clicks.
© 2020 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Search engine optimization; Tobit Model; Latent Semantic Analysis

Firms use Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques to
promote websites by increasing their visibility on search engine
results pages (SERPs). As a large majority of users begin their
online browsing experience using search engines, SEM accounts
for the largest share (47%) of digital marketing spend (Silverman
2010). SEM aims to increase the prominence of a link on the
Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) by appearing higher on
either the sponsored and/or the organic portions of the SERP
(see Fig. 1 for an example SERP). SEM comprises of two parts:
(1) search engine optimization (SEO) which aims at getting a
higher rank and more clicks from the organic search results on
the SERP and (2) sponsored search advertising (SSA) which
aims at getting a higher rank and more clicks from the sponsored
search results on the SERP.
夽 We would like to thank a digital media advertising firm for providing the
data used in this study. We would also like to thank Arvind Rangaswamy, Gary
Lilien, and participants of the 2018 Marketing Science Conference for providing
feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the
Marketing Science Institute (MSI) and its Young Scholars program for providing
financial support for this research (MSI Grant #4-1921). This research is part of
While significant academic research has focused on SSA
(e.g., Skiera and Nabout 2013; Wiesel, Pauwels, and Arts 2011;
Li et al. 2016), research on SEO is relatively scarce. This seems
surprising, given that organic links are considered to be more
trustworthy by the users (Purcell, Brenner, and Rainie 2012),
account for the majority of clicks on a SERP (Baye, De los
Santos, and Wildenbeest 2016; Jerath, Ma, and Park 2014), and
also get a lion’s share of SEM spending ($65 billion1 against the
$35 billion2 spent on sponsored links in 2016).
Organic links on the SERPs are ranked by search engines
using various criteria. These include factors such as authority
of the website, quality of the incoming links, and relevance of
webpage content to the search query.3 There are a lot of different
SEO techniques firms use to increase the rankings and with it
the number of organic clicks for their website. These techniques
can be broadly divided into 2 distinct groups – on-page and
off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves optimizing the content
on the website to improve its quality and structure. Off-page
1 https://www.borrellassociates.com/industry-papers/papers/2016/trends-in-

the first author’s dissertation. digital-marketing-services-april-16-detail.

∗ Corresponding author. 2 https://www.statista.com/statistics/266627/projected-spending-on-search

E-mail addresses: mayanknagpal@psu.edu (M. Nagpal), jap57@psu.edu -marketing-in-the-us/.

(J.A. Petersen). 3 https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2020.12.002
0022-4359/© 2020 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Nagpal, Mayank, and Petersen, J. Andrew, Keyword Selection Strategies in Search Engine Optimization: How
Relevant is Relevance? Journal of Retailing, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2020.12.002
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Fig. 1. Search engine results page.
SEO refers to the actions such as link building which are taken
off-site to increase the website’s credibility, trustworthiness, and
authority for the users and the search engines. Both off-page and
on-page SEO work towards a common goal of achieving higher
rankings on SERPs and more organic clicks. On-page and off-
page SEO work together to improve search engine rankings in
complementary fashion; however, practitioners generally advise
focusing on on-page SEO to achieve short run goals as it can
achieve faster results than off-page SEO.4
Both SEO practitioners and academic researchers (Luh,
Yang, and Huang 2016) have found content relevance to be
among the top few factors affecting organic rank. According to
Google’s SEO guidelines, creating compelling and useful con-
tent will likely influence website ranking more than any other
factor.5 Thus, several market research surveys have found rele-
vant content creation and keyword research as the most effective
on-page SEO tactic.6 In order to get a large number of clicks, it is
important to get ranked on the SERP for the appropriate search
queries. While writing new content on their websites, managers
need to select keywords7 to target search queries on which they
want to focus this content. A typical keyword selection pro-
cess for SEO involves content marketers using keyword research
tools to identify appropriate keywords for writing content. The
keywords are selected, using best judgement and knowledge of
4 https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/09/16/10-takeaways-from-the
-state-of-seo-survey/.
5 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en.
6 http://webpromo.expert/google-qa-march/.
7 The term keyword is used to refer to the topic area that the firm wants to
write content about on a given webpage. The term search query is used to refer
to the text that a user types to search on a search engine. For the purpose of this
study, we assume the search queries are manifestations of underlying keywords.
2
Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
the business area, to fit the following three criteria. Selected
keywords should: (1) have enough search volume for which it
would be worthwhile to create and optimize content; (2) have a
relatively low PPC competition score; and (3) naturally fit and
make sense for the content on the website and should match the
search intent of the users being targeted.
So ideally, a firm would want to create web content about
relevant keywords with high search volumes and low levels of
competition. This would allow the firm to get ranked highly on
the SERP and receive a large share of the large potential number
of clicks. However, it is uncommon to find such a keyword;
search queries that receive higher search volume also tend to
have a higher corresponding level of competition. See Table 1
for an example list of healthcare-based search queries with their
corresponding search traffic and relative number of competitors.
A broad search query, that is it represents a broader topic area,
is often searched by a larger number of users as compared to a
more specific search query, that is it represents a narrower topic
area, but often also has a larger number of websites creating
landing pages relevant to it. Thus, firms often face a trade-off
between creating pages relevant to broad search queries (poten-
tially getting a small share of a large market) versus specific
search queries (potentially getting a large share of a small mar-
ket). As an example, a website for a bicycle retailer needs to
decide whether it should create a landing page focused on a
broad topic such as “Electric Bikes” or a more specific sub-topic
such as “Which electric bike is the fastest?”.
Another consideration in the keyword selection decision is
analyzing the intent of the user’s search query, that is whether
the search query is informational, transactional or navigational.
Users conducting informational searches (e.g., “blenders vs.
food processors”, “wattage required for blenders”), are look-
ing for information about products and usually represent search
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Table 1
Example of search queries commonly used for healthcare-related searches.
Search queries Traffic Relative # of competitors

1 Malaria parasite life cycle 36 .15

2 Symptoms of type 1 diabetes in a child 451 .21
3 Sore throat medicine for toddlers 1701 .54
4 Type 1 vs type 2 diabetes symptoms 1701 .07
5 Malaria symptoms 26651 .13
6 Sore throat medicine 26651 .97
7 Type1 diabetes symptoms 26651 .80
8 Type2 diabetes symptoms 65701 .83

*Data calculated based on information from Google AdWords.

Notes: Table 1 provides information on the traffic each search query receives and the number of sites bidding on each search query relative to all search queries
across Google. The first four search queries in Table 1 are specific search queries. A specific or long-tail search query is often longer, in this case each search query
is at least 4 words in length, and more descriptive as the searcher has already defined a narrower topic to search. This leads to smaller search volumes on that search
query and as a result, fewer firms wanting to compete on that search query. The second four search queries in Table 1 are broad search queries. A broad or generic
search query is often shorter, in this case each search query is three or fewer words in length, and less descriptive as the searcher is often trying to define a narrower
topic to search. This leads to larger search volumes on that search query and as a result, more firms wanting to compete on that search query. They need to select
between getting a larger part of the small user base of specific search queries and getting a smaller part of the larger user base of broad search queries.
For instance, even though a specific search query such as “malaria parasite life cycle” has low relative number of competitors (.15), meaning that it will be easier
for a firm to rank highly with relevant content, it also has a relatively small volume of search traffic (36). Additionally, we can see that a broad search query such as
“sore throat medicine” has a relatively high volume of search traffic (26,651), meaning that there are a lot of potential clicks available, but it also has a high relative
number of competitors (.97). Thus, a firm must decide whether it is better to create web content for search queries with relatively higher traffic and competition (i.e.,
potentially get a smaller share of a bigger market) or for search queries with relatively lower traffic and competition (i.e., potentially get a larger share of a smaller
market).

behaviors at the top of the online purchase funnel. Users con-
ducting transactional searches (e.g., “cheap food processors”,
“best food processors”), are usually searching with the intent
of making a transaction but are still searching for the retailer
or brand they desire to purchase. Users conducting navigational
searches (e.g., “Blendtec blenders”, “Ninja food processors”),
are searching with the intent of making a purchase from a specific
website/retailer and usually represent the bottom of the online
purchase funnel. As user intent is different for different types
of search queries, firms need to understand which SEO strategy
would be more effective for targeting each type of search intent.
To help retailers solve this problem, we analyze how focus-
ing content on keywords related to specific search queries with
certain characteristics affects user click behavior on the SERP.
Accordingly, we propose a modeling framework to study how
key search characteristics (search query popularity, search query
competition, search query specificity, and user search intent) as
well as two key retailer/website characteristics (content rele-
vance and online authority) affect the organic clicks a website
receives for a search query. The framework provides model-
based guidance to SEO practitioners in their keyword selection
decisions by studying how effectiveness of writing relevant
content varies with search query and website type. We try to
understand how search characteristics and retailer/website char-
acteristics interact together to influence user click behavior. This
allows us to rank search queries based on the estimated number
of clicks a given website will receive.
We find that conducting on-page SEO by optimizing content,
that is increasing relevance of the content to the search query,
to transactional or lower funnel search queries is more effective
in getting clicks than optimizing content on upper funnel search
queries with informational intent. In order to target informational
search queries retailers should focus more on their off-page SEO
using link building techniques to improve their online authority.
As off-page SEO is a more long-term process, a direct implica-
tion of this finding in the short run is that firms which have
already worked on their off-page SEO should leverage their
higher authority to get clicks by optimizing content to infor-
mational search queries. On the other hand, retailers which have
lower online authority should try to gain more clicks from trans-
actional search queries where the short-term strategy of content
optimization through increasing relevance is more effective.
In the following sections, we present an overview of the
existing literature on both SSA and SEO and build on this by
presenting a conceptual model where we present the expected
relationships between the search and website characteristics and
the organic clicks a website receives for a given search query. We
use data for 1,791 search queries relevant to three different firms
from three different industries (online retailer, culinary school,
and urgent health care provider) to empirically test our concep-
tual model. Finally, we discuss the results of our model and its
implications to the theory and practice of SEO.
Literature Review
To date, extant work on SEM primarily focuses on SSA with
little research dedicated so far to SEO. In this literature review
we look at relevant research for both SSA and SEO. Table 2
provides a summary of the related papers in these fields as well
as the relevant contribution from each of the papers.
Research studying the relationship between SSA and SEO
campaigns provide mixed evidence about the importance of
sponsored results in SEO. On one hand, click-through rates,
conversions rates, and revenues in the presence of both paid
and organic search listings are significantly higher than those in
the absence of paid search (Yang and Ghose 2010). On the other

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Table 2
Literature review of SSA and SEO research.
Authors
Nabout and Skiera (2012)
Skiera and Nabout (2013)
Li et al. (2016)
Baye, De los Santos, and
Wildenbeest (2016)
Jerath, Ma, and Park (2014)
Kritzinger and Weideman
(2015)
Berman and Katona (2013)
Yang and Ghose (2010)
Taylor (2013)
White (2013)
Rutz and Bucklin (2011)
Rutz and Bucklin (2007)
Abou Nabout (2015)
Yao and Mela (2011)
Chen, Liu, and Whinston
(2009)
Feng, Bhargava, and Pennock
(2007)
De los Santos and Koulayev
(2013)
Rutz, Bucklin, and Sonnier
(2012)
Kang and Kim (2003)
Agarwal, Hosanagar, and
Smith (2011)
Ghose and Yang (2009)
White and Morris (2007)
White, Dumais, and Teevan
(2009)
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Field Relevant contribution
SSA Return on investment in quality improvement not always positive due to the negative effect on
CPC due to the increased rank. Disentangled the negative direct price effect from the positive
indirect price effect of quality improvement.
SSA Developed and implemented the PROSAD (Profit Optimizing Search Engine Advertising)
bidding decision support system to automatically determine optimized bids that maximize the
advertiser’s profit.
SSA Studied the impact of attribution strategies on the realized ROI of keywords in search
campaigns. They find that first-click attribution leads to lower revenue returns and a more
pronounced decrease in CTR for more specific keywords.
SEO A retailer’s investments in factors such as the quality and brand awareness of its site increases
organic clicks both directly by making the site more attractive to consumers and indirectly by
improving its rank on the SERP.
SEO/SSA Consumers who search for less popular keywords expend more effort in their search for
information and are closer to a purchase. This makes them more targetable for sponsored
search advertising
SEO/SSA After a certain period of time, an investment in search engine optimization rather than a
pay-per-click campaign appears to produce better results at lower cost.
SEO/SSA SEO improves search engine’s ranking quality and thus customer satisfaction. This increases
consumer’s trust in organic links lowering SE’s revenue from sponsored links. They find an
inverse U-shaped relationship between the minimum bid and search engine profits.
SEO/SSA There is a positive interdependence between the click through rate on organic and paid
listings. The positive impact of organic clicks on paid clicks is 3.5 times stronger than the
opposite impact.
SEO/SSA As high-quality organic links cannibalize sponsored clicks SE have an incentive for quality
degradation of the organic results to increase revenues.
SEO/SSA When improvements in search quality benefit all users equally, advertisers will charge a
higher price. However, when improvements in search quality provide a greater benefit to
novice searchers, advertisers will charge a lower price.
SSA There is a significant spillover from generic to branded search as generic search causes an
awareness of relevance of the brand. Incorporating this spillover considerably improves the
financial performance of generic keywords for any firm.
SSA Developed a model for studying individual keyword performance using hierarchical Baye’s
model demonstrating the importance of keyword-level covariates and heterogeneity in
conversion estimates.
SSA Compared multiple algorithms for finding the optimal profit maximizing bids.
SSA A dynamic structural model of the sponsored search advertising market finds the following: 1.
enabling firms to vary bids by consumer segment causes revenue gains for both firms and SE
along with improving consumer welfare, 2. second price auctions increase firm’s bids, 3.
consumer search tools increase consumer welfare and SE revenues but reduce advertiser
profits
SSA Find the optimal share of exposure allocated to each bidder by SEs and how this changes with
the price elasticity of advertisers.
SSA Propose a rank-revision strategy weights clicks on lower ranked items more than clicks on
higher ranked items. This method converges to optimal ordering faster and more consistently.
SEO/SSA Propose an optimal ranking strategy of search results that maximizes consumers’
click-through rates (CTR) based on their preferences. This ranking system also increases
consumer welfare.
SSA Propose a modeling approach for assessing keyword performance in a sparse data
environment. They find that higher positions have higher click-through and conversion rates.
Information processing Compared the performance of multiple scoring algorithms for different types of user queries,
classified based on user intent.
SSA Evaluate the impact of ad placement on revenues and profits generated from sponsored
search: 1. CTR decreases with position 2. conversion rate increases and then decreases for
long keywords
SSA Analyzed the relationship between keyword covariates and SSA performance: 1. CTR and
conversion rate decreases with rank. 2. CTR is less for more specific keywords. 3. Top ranked
position not the most profitable due to the difference in CPC.
SEO/SSA There are differences in the queries, clicks, post-query browsing, and search success of
advanced and novice users.
SEO/SSA Develop a model to predict expertise based on search behavior and describe how knowledge
about domain expertise can be used to improve search results help increase user expertise
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Table 2 (Continued)
Authors Field Relevant contribution

Shi and Trusov (2013)
Broder (2002)
Rose and Levinson (2004)
Brynjolfsson, Hu, and Smith,
2003
Brynjolfsson, Hu, and Smith,
2003
Brynjolfsson, Hu, and
Simester, 2011
Shani and Chalasani (1992)
Skiera et al. (2010)
Page and Brin (1998)
Luh, Yang, and Huang (2016)
Mavridis and Symeonidis
(2015)
Liu and Toubia (2015)
Evans (2007)
SEO/SSA Content of listings, textual information of previously viewed links and search intent influence
the scanning behavior of users on SERP.
SEO/SSA Classified information needs or search queries into informational, navigational and
transactional
SEO/SSA Propose a framework for understanding the underlying goals of user searches.
Digital marketing Increased product variety leads to an increase in consumer surplus in the online market
(long-tail phenomenon)
Digital marketing Identified supply side and demand side drivers of the long tail phenomenon along with its
effects on consumers as well as producers.
Digital marketing Internet search and discovery tools, such as recommendation engines, are associated with the
increase in share of niche products.
Niche marketing Provides a framework for implementation of relationship marketing for niche markets in the
packaged goods industry.
SSA Top 20% of all keywords attract on average 98.16% of all searches and generate 97.21% of all
clicks. Hence, advertisers do not need to bother too much about the performance of keywords
in the long tail.
SEO/SSA This paper describes PageRank, a method for rating web pages objectively and mechanically,
effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them.
SEO PageRank (PR) is the most dominant factor in Google ranking function. The title follows as
the second most important, and the snippet and the URL have roughly equal importance with
variations among queries.
Information technology Developed a benchmark crawler called LHS Rank which incorporates semantics and
compares its performance against established metrics.
SEO/SSA Develops a topic model Hierarchically Dual Latent Dirichlet Allocation (HDLDA), to find a
relationship between main topics in search queries and search results. This helps understand
consumer’s content preferences using the semantic mapping between search queries and
results.
SEO Studied the SEO techniques used by top practitioners to find that: 1. multiple pages were
generated to influence ranking with limited success, 2. PageRank very important in SEO, 3.
firms use older domains for higher rankings.

hand, a webpage with high attractiveness, which is likely to rank
higher on the organic links, has a lower incentive to bid for spon-
sored links as consumer trust in sponsored links is lower (Katona
and Sarvary 2010). Further, SEO campaigns have been shown
to be more cost effective than SSA (Kritzinger and Weideman
2015) and increase consumer satisfaction (Berman and Katona
2013). However, given that the two sets of search results are
interconnected, it is important to consider past literature from
both these topics as important insights can be obtained from past
studies on the sponsored results.
Sponsored Search Advertising (SSA)
The first set of papers in the field of SSA study how link allo-
cation and auction strategies of search engines (Feng, Bhargava,
and Pennock 2007; De los Santos and Koulayev 2013) and bid-
ding and attribution strategies of websites (Skiera and Nabout
2013; Li et al. 2016; Abou Nabout 2015) affect financial perfor-
mance of firms and consumer satisfaction. Researchers in this
field study the importance of incorporating consumer choice (De
los Santos and Koulayev 2013) and content relevance (Feng,
Bhargava, and Pennock 2007) in a search engine’s ranking
procedure along with the importance of website quality improve-
ment (Nabout and Skiera 2012) and keyword heterogeneity
(Rutz and Bucklin 2007; Rutz, Bucklin, and Sonnier 2012; Kang
and Kim 2003) in websites’ SSA strategies. These findings col-
lectively provide insights on how firms could improve rank and
get more clicks through SSA. Factors related to auction and
bidding strategies are not directly applicable to improving the
ranking on organic search results, as the ranking algorithm for
organic results does not consider auction bids while ordering
results. However, we expect that factors such as website quality,
relevance of content and search query heterogeneity, identified
in the SSA literature, will apply to our context of SEO.
Another group of researchers in SSA study how consumer
search patterns differ in terms of user expertise (White and
Morris 2007; White, Dumais, and Teevan 2009), keyword type
(Jerath, Ma, and Park 2014; Agarwal, Hosanagar, and Smith
2011; White, Dumais, and Teevan 2009) and search state, that
is exploration state and evaluation state (Shi and Trusov 2013).
Researchers in this area classify search queries based on the
underlying need of the users (Broder 2002; Kim and Kang
2003; Rose and Levinson 2004), popularity (Jerath, Ma, and
Park 2014), the stage of the purchase process (Li et al. 2016),
user expertise (White and Morris 2007; White, Dumais, and
Teevan 2009), and branded versus generic search queries (Rutz
and Bucklin 2011). These classifications are useful for studying
how different types of search queries can affect SEM strategies of
firms. Rutz, Bucklin, and Sonnier (2012) showed that incorporat-
ing keyword heterogeneity in SSA strategies can be profitable for
firms as consumer behavior differs across search queries. Others
have shown that even though the higher ranked links have higher

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CTRs, conversion rates increase with link positions (Agarwal,

Hosanagar, and Smith 2011; Ghose and Yang 2009) as a larger
proportion of users clicking the lower ranked links have high pur-
chase intent. The increase in conversion rate is higher for more
specific search queries (Agarwal, Hosanagar, and Smith 2011)
as users tend to spend more effort in finding relevant links and
thus click on results much lower in the sponsored results. Also,
the importance of search intent (Schultz 2016; Schultz 2019;
Rutz and Bucklin 2011) is noted in SEM. These studies use
the informational, transactional, and navigational search inten-
tion classification (Broder 2002; Jansen, Booth, and Spink 2008;
Fig. 2. Conceptual model.
Jansen and Schuster 2011) to analyze the performance of SSA
campaigns. They find differences across these intentions for the
advertising rank, click-through rate, cost per click, offline sign- mental website and search query characteristics, the importance
ing rate, and cost per contract. Even while noting that findings of which is less likely to change over time.
from sponsored listings may not be directly applicable to SEO
due to differences in competitive strategies of firms and user
Conceptual Model
beliefs about sponsored links, we see that search query types
play a crucial role in SEO strategy.
When writing new web content, retailers need to select key-
words on which to focus content. If we consider each keyword as
a separate “market” of consumers, then the decision of select-
ing a keyword is analogous to selecting a target market. Past
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
research has shown that the most important factors which firms
consider when selecting the target market are market size (Abratt
Research on SEO is scarce likely due to the lack of publicly
1993; Scaperlanda and Mauer 1969), level of competition in the
available data for important variables such as clicks on each link,
market, and nature of customer needs (Abratt 1993). In our con-
the complexity of the ever-changing ranking algorithms, and the
ceptual model, we assume that firms who invest in SEO select
difficulty in measuring important variables such as the semantic
keywords based on observed search queries which are likely
relevance of website content. Extant research identifies the most
to get them the maximum number of organic clicks. Thus, we
important SEO strategies. For example, Baye, De los Santos, and
study the major factors which affect the number of organic clicks
Wildenbeest (2016) find that investments in quality and brand
a website gets from the SERP of a given search query. The fac-
awareness increases organic traffic to a website both directly,
tors which we include in our model are the rank of the website
by influencing consumer behavior on the SERP, and indirectly
on the SERP, the characteristics of the retailer/website, the char-
by improving rank or the prominence of a link on the SERP.
acteristics of the search query and other control variables (see
In addition to website quality and brand related factors such as
Fig. 2).
PageRank (Page and Brin 1998) and website authority, studies
find content related factors such as the content relevance of the
title and the snippet as the most important factors in determining Organic Rank
organic ranks on Google SERPs (Luh, Yang, and Huang 2016).
Additionally, other studies suggest improvements in SEO by The probability of a user to click on a link in an SERP
incorporating semantic factors (Mavridis and Symeonidis 2015) is dependent on the organic rank (Baye, De los Santos, and
and consumer information needs (Liu and Toubia 2015). Wildenbeest 2016; Feng, Bhargava, and Pennock 2007; Shi and
These papers study the effect of factors affecting organic rank Trusov 2013). The first three ranked links get about 60% of
and how SEO techniques such as investment in improving brand all clicks on the SERP and the first page gets about 90% of
awareness (Baye, De los Santos, and Wildenbeest 2016) and con- the clicks.8 Thus, a major part of SEO involves firms aiming to
tent relevance (Luh, Yang, and Huang 2016) can help firms. In improve their rank on the SERP in order to get a larger number of
contrast, we study how the effect of these content and quality clicks. Organic Rank is determined by the search engines based
improvement SEO techniques (off-page and on-page SEO) on on many factors. SEO practitioners have identified over 200
organic clicks varies across the type of search query. By doing factors which affect the organic rank of a webpage on an SERP.
so, we aim to provide model-based guidance to retailers in mak- These include domain level factors such as domain authority and
ing keyword selection choices based on search query type. A key age, page level factors such as page authority and content rele-
difficulty for any retailer to determine the most important fac- vance, backlink factors such as number and quality of inbound
tors to be used while selecting keywords to get a high organic links, user interaction factors such as click through rates (CTR),
ranking is that not only do search engines use many factors and social signals such number of Twitter mentions.
while ranking the organic list, but also continuously keep updat-
ing their ranking algorithm (Evans 2007). We aim to do this by
building a modeling framework which focuses on certain funda- 8 https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

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Fig. 3. Search and purchase funnel.
Retailer/Website Characteristics
We consider two website characteristics in our conceptual
model, online authority and content relevance. Online authority
represents the overall quality and popularity of the website in its
domain of expertise.9 Content relevance represents the degree of
overlap or semantic and textual similarity between the webpage
content and the search query. As both these characteristics make
a website more attractive to the users searching for any given
topic, we expect that an improvement in either of the two leads
to a larger number of clicks (Mavridis and Symeonidis 2015;
Liu and Toubia 2015).
Search Characteristics
We also consider the characteristics of the search query. The
characteristics which we look at are search query specificity, the
search intent or search type, and a dummy variable indicating
whether the website is placed on the sponsored results for the
search query SERP.
Search query specificity is a measure of how broad or specific
a search query is (Li et al. 2016) within a product category (niche
vs. broad market). For example, for a retailer selling electric
bikes, a search query such as “Electric Bike” is broader com-
pared to a more specific search query such as “Class III Electric
Bike” as it represents a more niche market. Past literature has
shown that users conducting specific search queries are more
advanced in the search process (Jerath, Ma, and Park 2014;
White, Dumais, and Teevan 2009) and have higher purchase
intent (Moe 2003). Specific search queries are niche segments
(Skiera, Eckert, and Hinz 2010), where customers have a dis-
tinct set of needs and pay premium to firms which best satisfy
their needs (Kotler 2003). Researchers have explained how
niches have greater growth and profit potential for firms due to
economies of specialization (Kotler 2003; Shani and Chalasani
1992; Toften and Hammervoll 2010; Dalgic and Leeuw 1994).
Thus, making content relevant to a more specific search query
should get a larger number of organic clicks.
The search intent is defined as the consumer’s intent, or real
meaning, behind the search queries. It is important for firms to
understand the real intent of searches in order to target the most
appropriate type of users. Past literature has classified search
9 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/search-authority/.
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Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
intent into three broad categories: informational search queries
where the user is looking for some information, transactional
search queries where the user is looking to purchase a prod-
uct, and navigational search queries where the user is looking
for a specific website (Broder 2002; Jansen, Booth, and Spink
2008; Jansen and Schuster 2011; Lewandowski 2006; Rose and
Levinson 2004) (see Fig. 3).
The three types of search queries represent the different stages
of the SEO purchase funnel (Schultz 2019; Rutz and Bucklin
2011; Schultz 2016). Informational search queries are typically
searched by users at the top of the SEO funnel who are search-
ing the web for some information about a product (e.g., “What
is the difference between a Blender and a Food Processor?”).
These users are at the awareness stage of the purchase process
and are looking to learn about the product they intend to buy.
Transactional search queries are searched by users who have a
buying intent but are at a consideration stage (e.g., “cheap food
processors”, “best food processors”). At this stage users have
decided which product to buy but are still exploring different
brands or retailers. Navigational search queries are searched by
users which are aware of the brand/retailer website they want
to buy from and represents the purchasing stage or the lowest
end of the SEO funnel (e.g., “Blendtec blenders”, “Ninja food
processors”).
Moderating Role of Retailer characteristics and User Intent
In our conceptual model, we also look at how the two
retailer/website characteristics, that is content relevance and
online authority interact with the search intent of users to affect
the number of organic clicks the retailer gets from a given search
query. The interaction effects help us analyze whether the effec-
tiveness of writing relevant content varies with search query and
website characteristics.
Rutz and Bucklin (2011) showed that users conducting infor-
mational search queries have a lower awareness of relevance
compared to users conducting navigational or transactional
search queries. Users who conduct a generic informational
search are at the early stage of awareness or information gather-
ing and would be less involved in the search process (Jerath, Ma,
and Park 2014; White, Dumais, and Teevan 2009). Thus, they
might not be aware of the brand or product, or when they are,
they might not be aware that the brand or product is relevant for
the search. As the main goal of such users is to gather informa-
tion, we expect they would prefer to gain that information from
a well-known website having higher authority in that area.
However, when searchers move to a more advanced stage
of the online purchase process and search for transactional or
navigational search queries, we expect that users will expend
more effort to find more relevant links (Agarwal, Hosanagar, and
Smith 2011; Rutz and Bucklin 2011). Thus, we expect that while
making the click decision, content relevance is more important
to users conducting transactional or navigational search queries,
whereas online authority is more important for users searching
for informational search queries.
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Model Development
In this section, we provide the methodology used for empir-
ically validating the conceptual model presented in Fig. 3. Our
goal is to translate the conceptual framework into a model that
can be estimated. This would allow us to empirical uncover
the drivers of organic clicks for different retailers for different
search queries. However, before we can directly estimate the
model, we need to address several modeling challenges. These
challenges include the endogeneity of organic rank, unobserved
heterogeneity, limited dependent variables, and the correlation
across equations.
Endogeneity of Rank
Search engines continuously update their SERP rankings10 to
generate the most relevant search results, which means that our
rank variable will depend on past clicks. The standard approach
in the literature on clicks at platforms (e.g., clicks at price
comparison sites or sponsored clicks at search engines) is to
assume that such positions are exogenous. However, using the
Wu–Hausman test for endogeneity on our sample, we reject the
hypothesis that rank is exogenous in our data (p = .023). In order
to control for the potential endogeneity of rank in the model, we
take an instrumental variable approach. We use search query
competition, which represents the level of competition in the
search query market, as an IV for this model. We expect that the
level of competition in the search query market would impact
the organic rank of a website as it would have to compete with a
larger number of websites for a rank on the organic list. However,
it should not have a direct impact on the user’s click decision on
an SERP, except through its impact on rank, as users are largely
unaware of the level of competition in the search query market.
We believe this makes search query competition an appropriate
IV for this model. In order to estimate the parameters of the
model, we will need to estimate an IV-based regression model
where we control for the endogeneity of rank.
Unobserved Heterogeneity
The data has unobserved heterogeneity among firms as well
as among the search queries. There are unobserved differences
among firms due to various factors such as varying profitability
and competition in specific industries to which firms belong. To
account for this unobserved heterogeneity of firms we use firm
fixed effects in the models to capture differences across firms.
We also need to capture the observed and unobserved differences
among search queries. We control for the observed differences
across search queries by using the three search query character-
istics in our models. Additionally, to account for the unobserved
differences within search queries, we use relative measures of the
two website characteristics, that is online authority and content
relevance. To measure these variables, we subtract the average
value of these two measures for all other websites ranked on the
10 https://moz.com/blog/how-often-does-google-update-its-algorithm.
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Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
top three pages for a search query from the value of these for the
focal websites, that is a mean-differenced effect.
Limited Dependent Variables
The dependent variables, rank and organic clicks, are limited
dependent variables. The number of organic clicks is censored
below at 0, whereas organic rank is censored above at the maxi-
mum rank that is available in the data (i.e., 30) and below at the
minimum rank a webpage can achieve (i.e., 1). Thus, estimating
the models using OLS may lead to biased estimates (Heckman
1976). To overcome the issue of censoring in the dependent vari-
ables, we use the Tobit Model for estimating these two variables,
which is an approach proposed by Tobin (1958) to model limited
dependent variables.
Correlation Across Equations
Both dependent variables in our model, rank and organic
clicks, are part of the same overall process. As such, it is likely
that the models we estimate for these two dependent variables
are inherently related. As a result, we will estimate the equa-
tions jointly using a Conditional Mixed Process (CMP) in Stata
(Roodman 2017).
Modeling Framework
Based on these modeling challenges, we provide the full
model specification that is estimated for the regression process
in Eqs. (1) and (2) below:

Rankik = f 1 α1 + α2 ∗ Online Authority Diff ik + α3
∗ Content Relevance Diff ik + α4 ∗ Informationalk
+α5 ∗ Transactionalk + α6 ∗ Search Query Specificityk
+ α7 ∗ SSAik + α8 ∗ Informationalk
∗Content Relevance Diff ik + α9 ∗ Informationalk
∗Online Authority Diff ik + α10 ∗ Transactionalk
∗ Content Relevance Diff ik + α11 ∗ Transactionalk
∗Online Authority Diff ik + α12

∗Search Query Competitionk + F + vik (1)
Organic Clicksik = f 2 (β1 + β2 ∗ Rankik + β3
∗Online Authority Diff ik + β4 ∗ Content Relevance Diff ik
+β5 ∗ Informationalk + β6 ∗ Transactionalk
+β7 ∗ Search Query Specificityk + β8 ∗ SSAik
+ β9 ∗ Informationalk ∗ Content Relevance Diff ik
+ β10 ∗ Informationalk ∗ Online Authority Diff ik
+ β11 ∗ Transactionalk ∗ Content Relevance Diff ik
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+ β12 ∗ Transactionalk ∗ Online Authority Diff ik + F
+ εik (2)
where
• Rankik is the rank of website i on the organic list on SERP
for search query k.
• Online Authority Diff ik is the relative online authority for
website i on search query k.
• Content Relevance Diff ik is the relative content relevance of
website i to search query k.
• Informationalk is the dummy indicating if search query k is
Informational.
• Transactionalk is the dummy indicating if search query k is
Transactional.
• Search Query Specificityk is the specificity of search query
k.
• SSAik is a dummy indicating if an ad for the website i exists
on the sponsored results for search query k.
• Search Query Competitionk is the level of competitiveness
for search query k.
• F represents the firm fixed effects.
• f1(.) (f2(.)) is the one-sided (two-sided) Tobit functional form.
• vik and εik represent the error terms.
The two equations (Eqs. (1) and (2)) above are estimated to
obtain the expected organic click for a website from any given
search query based on search query and website characteristics.
The estimated or the expected clicks can be used as a measure of
how lucrative a keyword based on a set of search queries is to a
firm and its website. This can be used by firms in their keyword
research campaigns to identify the most lucrative search queries
based on the relationship between the search query characteris-
tics studied (search query competition, search query specificity,
search type) and the expected organic clicks, given the website
characteristics.
Empirical Application
Data Description
We empirically validate the relationships described in the
conceptual model using data for three firms from three different
industries. The dataset contains information on organic clicks
on the three websites for search queries relevant to these three
firms and their main competitors for a given month. The firms
include an online retailer, a culinary school, and an urgent health
care provider. We have data for the first 30 links of the SERP
for 1129, 331, and 331 search queries respectively for the three
firms. We use data from the first three pages as these pages typi-
cally account for more than 90% of the clicks (Moz Study 2015)
from SERPs. The data contains information on search query
traffic and the number of organic clicks for the focal firm accu-
mulated over a month, along with the Cost Per Click (CPC). It
also contains information about the domain and page authority
of the first 30 ranked links for each search query. Table 3 pro-
9
Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
vides a list of all variables used in the model along with their
descriptions and sources, Table 4a provides some descriptive
statistics and correlations of the variables, and Table 4b breaks
down the descriptive statistics by retailer.
Dependent variables
Organic clicks are measured as the number of clicks received
by a website from the organic list on the SERP. Organic rank is
the minimum rank of a website on the SERP of a search query.11
Online authority (diff)
The online authority of a webpage is defined as the stand-
ing or the impact the page has in its field of expertise (Kleinberg
1999). We use two metrics, domain authority and page authority
to derive our measure of online authority.12 Moz’s Page/Domain
Authority is a metric on how high a given webpage/domain is
likely to rank in search results regardless of its content. It is based
on the Linkscape web index and includes link count, mozRank
and several more metrics. The highest score is achieved for
pages/domain that are heavily linked and for pages that are near
to the top of SERPs. They are aggregates of several other met-
rics including MozRank, MozTrust, quality of the link profile,
and other factors which are known to affect rank of the web-
site. They are represented as integer values from 1 to 100 on
a logarithmic scale and are calculated by combining more than
40 parameters into a single score. Given that the authority met-
rics comprise of several other important variables, they measure
the overall quality of the site and the page. In a survey study
conducted by SEOMoz surveying over 150 leading search mar-
keters, it was found that authority factors were considered most
important among the 90 ranking factors surveyed. We create an
online authority index from these two metrics by performing a
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the two authority fac-
tors (page authority and domain authority) and taking the first
component as the measure of online authority of a website. In
our model, we consider online authority as a relative measure,
that is we compare the online authority of a given website against
the average online authority of the competitor websites on that
search query. We use the following formula to measure a given
website’s online authority relative to competing websites:
Online Authority Diff ik = Online Authorityik
− Online Authority
¯ k (3)
11 As the data contains instances where multiple webpages from the same
domain are ranked for the same search query, we take the minimum rank obtained
by any webpage from the firm as the rank of the page of that website. The
minimum rank is used for the estimation as we assume that all the organic clicks
received by the website from the SERP, come from the first instance the user
sees a link from the domain or the website.
12 The domain authority part of online authority represents the overall authority
the domain is perceived to have across all its webpages. As a robustness check we
found that the domain authority as computed by Moz creates the same rank order
in terms of domain rank as we find from the website ranking service Alexa.com.
We use Moz to create our measure of online authority as it includes a composite
of both the domain and webpage authority whereas Alexa.com only provides a
measure of the domain rank.
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Table 3
Variable descriptions and data sources.
Variable name Description Source

Outcome variable
Organic Clicks(ik) Natural log of the number of organic clicks on website i from Focal firm
search query k
Drivers of organic clicks
Rank(ik) Minimum rank of any webpage associated with site i on SERP for Focal firm
search query k
Online authority Online authority of focal website i – average online authority of all Moz
difference(ik) other websites ranked on the first three pages of search query k
Content relevance Content relevance of focal website i – average content relevance of Computed
difference(ik) all other websites ranked on the first three pages of search query k
Search type(k) Dummies representing whether search query k is transactional or Computed
navigational
Search query specificity(k) Length of the search query k after removing stop words Computed
Search query competition(k) Average cost per click (CPC) for getting placed in top three Google adwords
sponsored search results for search query k
SSA(k) Dummy variable representing if the focal website has a sponsored SEMRush
ad on the SERP for search query k

Table 4a
Descriptive statistics and correlations.
Variable name Mean Std dev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

1 Organic clicks 16.849 282.789 1

2 Rank 8.324 7.464 −.013 1
3 Online authority diff −.131 .786 .153 −.216 1
4 Content relevance diff .111 .294 .250 −.187 −.307 1
5 Search query specificity 3.196 1.131 .206 −.263 −.063 .378 1
6 Search query competition .603 .826 −.001 .114 .136 −.248 −.271 1
7 Informational .076 N/A .029 .013 −.112 .248 .174 −.173 1
8 Transactional .889 N/A −.078 .042 .067 −.248 −.240 .187 −.813 1
9 Navigational .035 N/A .092 −.091 .062 .067 .159 −.070 −.054 −.537 1
10 SSA .394 N/A .132 −.026 .036 −.233 −.280 .449 −.218 .255 −.123 1

Table 4b
Descriptive statistics by retailer.
Online retailer Culinary school Urgent care healthcare provider

Variable name Mean Std dev Mean Std dev Mean Std dev

1 Organic clicks 4.368 17.923 14.987 57.578 61.287 653.334

2 Rank 8.852 7.420 9.549 7.197 5.296 7.104
3 Online authority diff −.217 .618 .623 .972 −.585 .544
4 Content relevance diff .064 .233 −.075 .196 .455 .288
5 Search query specificity 2.765 .647 3.199 .768 4.661 1.458
6 Search query competition .762 .769 .627 1.110 .038 .205
7 Informational .004 N/A .154 N/A .257 N/A
8 Transactional .990 N/A .770 N/A .634 N/A
9 Navigational .006 N/A .076 N/A .109 N/A
10 SSA .557 N/A .215 N/A .018 N/A
No. of observations 1,129 331 331

Here we subtract the average online authority for all websites
for a given search query k which appear on the first three pages
of a SERP from the online authority of the focal website i for
search query k.
Content relevance (diff)
The content relevance of a webpage to a search query is the
degree of similarity between the content of the webpage and the
search query or the degree of relevance of webpage content to the
search query. There are a number of different textual relevance
measures such as the general edit distance or the Levenshtein
edit distance (Levenshtein 1966) which measure the textual sim-
ilarity of two phrases. However, these measures are not the most
appropriate measures when measuring content relevance in the
context of search engines as they do not consider the semantic
relationship between phrases, as semantics play a very important

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M. Nagpal, J.A. Petersen
Fig. 4. Calculating search query relevance.
role in SEM (Mavridis and Symeonidis 2015). Other researchers
in the field of SEM have incorporated semantics in their ranking
measures by using techniques such as Latent Semantic Analysis
(Luh, Yang, and Huang 2016) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation
(Mavridis and Symeonidis 2015; Liu and Toubia 2015). We
calculate content relevance as the lexical as well as semantic
similarity between the title of the webpage and the search query.
We use the webpage title for measuring content relevance for
several reasons. First, most SEO practitioners recommend that
the title should convey the most important and accurate message
of the webpage and should contain the most important search
queries contained in the page. Thus, it is expected that the firms
try to write a title which most accurately represents the content
of the webpage. Second, the searcher only sees the website title
and a snippet of text from the website before making the click
decision. So, the searcher’s click behavior is not a function of the
content of the website. Rather, it is a function of the searcher’s
expectations of the content of the website based on the website
title and snippet of text from the website. The website title is the
more prominent part of the search result shown to the searcher on
a SERP. So, we expect that the website title is primarily what the
searcher would use to make the decision about whether the link
is relevant or not. For calculating content relevance between a
search query and the title of any document, we adapt the method
used by Luh, Yang, and Huang (2016). Fig. 4 presents the entire
process we follow for calculating the content relevance of the
webpage to the search query. A more detailed description of this
process has been provided in Web Appendix A.
The method for measuring content relevance involves parti-
tioning the terms in the title of the webpage into two groups:
query terms which include terms in the title which are present
in the search query and non-query terms which include terms
in the title not present in the query. The relevance score for the
query and non-query terms is calculated separately and the over-
all content relevance is the sum of the non-query score and the
query score.
The query score is calculated in three steps. First, we calculate
the prominence score which measures how prominent the query
terms are in the title. Second, we calculate the proximity score
11
Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
which measures the degree to which all terms of the query or sub-
query occur together in the title. Third, we calculate the overall
query score as the product of the prominence and proximity
scores.
The second part of the relevance score, that is the score for the
non-query terms is calculated based on the semantic relationship
between the non-query and query terms derived using Latent
Semantic Analysis (LSA) which is a statistical technique for
extracting and inferring relations of contextual usage of words in
documents by using singular value decomposition. The overall
non-query score between the title and a search query is calculated
as the average semantic relationship score (described in detail in
Web Appendix A) between each non-query term and each term
in the search query. This two-part approach to measuring content
relevance provides a more comprehensive measure compared to
other typical methods such as Levenshtein distance or general
edit distance as it incorporates the semantic similarity of texts
in addition to the textual similarity.
Similar to online authority, we operationalize content rel-
evance as a relative measure, that is we compare the content
relevance of the focal website against the average content rele-
vance of the competitor websites for a given search query. Thus,
we use the following formula to calculate content relevance:
Content Relevance Diff ik = Content Relevanceik
− Content Relevance
¯ k (4)
Here we subtract the average content relevance for all websites
for a given search query k which appear on the first three pages
of a SERP from the content relevance of the focal website i for
search query k.
Search query specificity
Search query specificity is the specificity or broadness level of
the search query. We use the number of terms in the search query
as a measure for specificity as a longer search query is typically
more specific (Ghose and Yang 2009; Rutz and Bucklin 2011;
White, Dumais, and Teevan 2009). However, before calculating
the number of terms in the search query, we used a commonly
used stop word list (Page Analyzer English Stop Words List)
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M. Nagpal, J.A. Petersen
and remove any words in this list from our search query before
computing search query specificity.
Search query competition
Search query competition, which represents the level of com-
petition in the search query market, is measured by using the
Cost per Click (CPC) or bidding price for each search query. We
operationalize CPC as the average price in dollars that a website
must pay for each click obtained from the sponsored links on the
SERP for the top three positions in the sponsored search results
for that given search query.
Search type
The variable search type classifies search queries based on
the intent of the user, that is we classify search queries as
informational, transactional, or navigational. The categorization
approach is adapted from the manual classification of queries
in previous research by Jansen, Booth, and Spink (2008) and
Nabout and Skiera (2012). We use a three-step approach to
classify the search queries among different search types. First,
all search queries with website/brand names are classified as
navigational. When a user includes a particular brand or web-
site name in his search, he has likely made the decision about
where to make the purchase from and his search intent in that
case would be to navigate to a website which lets him buy the
product from his chosen brand or website. Second, out of the
search queries not classified as navigational, those which men-
tion the product, a service in a geography, or uses words related
to purchases such as “buy”, “cheap”, and so forth are classi-
fied as transactional. By including such words in her search,
the user indicates an intent to make a transaction. Also, as we
have excluded search queries which include brand names, a user
conducting these search queries is likely still in the consider-
ation stage of the buying process. Third, with characteristics
of navigational and transactional queries being defined clearly,
informational queries become the catchall by default. Thus,
search queries which are not classified as either navigational
or transactional are classified as informational. As the data used
for our analysis is from three retailers, a majority of the search
queries are classified as transactional (1,393 search queries)
whereas a much smaller number are classified as navigational
(236 search queries) or informational (162 search queries).
SSA
The variable SSA is a dummy variable depicting whether
the focal website appeared on the sponsored part of the SERP
of a search query. We see that out of 1,791 search queries, the
focal website was ranked on the sponsored results for 706 search
queries.
Results
We provide the results for the joint estimation of the Rank and
Organic Clicks models in Table 5. The table provides coefficient
estimates and standard errors for coefficients for the two models.
12
Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
Overall, we found that the majority of the variables in both of the
models were statistically significant suggesting a good model fit.
Rank Model
Search characteristics and user intent
We see that relative to navigational search queries, the
direct effects of informational search queries and transactional
search queries are positive and significant (β = 3.645; p < .01 and
β = 2.095; p < .05). This suggests that the average rankings of
the focal websites are lower for informational and transactional
search queries than for navigational search queries. We do see,
though, that search queries with a higher degree of specificity
(β = −1.398; p < .01) and those that have a sponsored search
link in addition to the organic link (β = −1.897; p < .01) lead to
higher rankings on the SERP.
Website/retailer characteristics
We see that the direct effect of online authority is not signifi-
cant (β = −.304; p > .10) when it comes to getting ranked on the
SERP. However, we see that the direct effect of content relevance
is highly negative and significant, leading to a significantly better
rating on the SERP (β = −4.118; p < .01).
Interaction effects
We see that several of the interaction effects are significant.
While the interaction between content relevance and informa-
tional search queries is not significant (β = 3.095; p > .10), the
interaction between online authority and informational search
queries is negative and significant (β = −2.613; p < .05). This
suggests that websites with higher online authority will get better
rankings when the searchers are seeking to obtain more infor-
mation (relative to navigational or transactional). We see that the
interaction between content relevance and transactional search
queries is positive and significant (β = 2.475; p < .01) and the
interaction between online authority and transactional search
queries is negative and significant (β = −3.227; p < .01). This
suggests that websites that have more relevant content (higher
online authority) will receive lower (higher) rankings when the
search queries are transactional in nature (relative to navigational
or informational).
Instrumental variable
We see that the instrumental variable of search query com-
petition is positive a highly significant (β = 6.055; p < .01). This
suggests that the higher the competition for a search query, the
lower the rank. In addition to its low correlation with the main
dependent variable (organic clicks), this provides further evi-
dence that search query competition is a valid instrument for the
Rank model.
Organic Clicks Model
Rank
We see that the rank of the website on the SERP has a neg-
ative and significant impact on the number of organic clicks
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Table 5
Estimation results.
Variables Rankik model coeff. (s.e.) ln(organic clicksik ) model coeff. (s.e.)

Intercept 10.794*** (1.139) −.148 (.196)

Rankik – −.001*** (.0002)
Search characteristics and user intent
Informationalk 3.645*** (1.147) −.051*** (.016)
Transactionalk 2.095** (.935) −.003*** (.001)
Search query specificityk −1.398*** (.149) .291*** (.023)
SSAk −1.897*** (.307) .261*** (.047)
Website/retailer characteristics
Online authorityik −.304 (.906) .651*** (.124)
Relevanceik −4.118*** (1.475) 2.622*** (.344)
Interaction effects
Relevanceik × informationalk 3.095 (2.870) −2.448*** (.397)
Authorityik × informationalk −2.613** (1.033) .366** (.146)
Relevanceik × transactionalk 2.475*** (.206) 1.307*** (.339)
Authorityik × transactionalk −3.227*** (.935) −1.448*** (.135)
Instrumental variable
Search query competitionk 6.055*** (.910) ----
Model fit
Log-likelihood −3,716.473
No. of observations 1,791

* 0.05<P value <0.1; ** 0.01<P value <0.05; *** P value < 0.

(β = −.001; p < .01). This suggests that as the rank gets higher,
that is, lower rank on the SERP, it leads to fewer organic clicks.
Search characteristics and user intent
We see that relative to navigational search queries, the main
effects of informational and transactional search queries are neg-
ative and significant at generating organic clicks (β = −.051;
p < .01 and β = −.003; p < .01). This suggests that the number
of organic clicks is lower for informational and transactional
search queries relative to navigational search queries. We see that
search query specificity (β = .291; p < .01) and SSA (β = .261;
p < .01) are both positive and significant. This suggests that when
search queries are more specific and when the website appears on
the sponsored search results, the website receives more organic
clicks on average.
Website/retailer characteristics
We see that the direct effect of online authority and content
relevance are both positive and significant (β = .651; p < .01;
β = 2.622; p < .01). As expected, this suggests that websites
which have higher online authority and are more relevant to
the search query lead to a higher number of organic clicks.
Interaction effects
We see that all of the interaction effects are significant.
We see the interaction between content relevance and informa-
tional search queries is negative and significant (β = −2.448;
p < .01), the interaction between online authority and infor-
mational search queries is positive and significant (β = .366;
p < .05). This suggests that websites with higher content rele-
vance (online authority) will get fewer (more) organic clicks
when search queries are informational in nature (relative to
navigational or transactional).
We see that the interaction between content relevance
and transactional search queries is positive and significant
(β = 1.307; p < .01) and the interaction between online author-
ity and transactional search queries is negative and significant
(β = −1.448; p < .01). This suggests that websites higher content
relevance (online authority) will receive more (fewer) organic
clicks when search queries are transactional in nature (relative
to navigational or informational).
Discussion
To provide some additional insights from our findings, we
used the estimates of our models to look at the impact of the
main and interaction effects on expected organic clicks. In this
case we compare the expected number of organic clicks when
we increase or decrease some of the key variables in the models
by plus or minus one standard deviation.
Main Effects
To evaluate the main effects of rank, online authority and
relevance, we computed the expected value of organic clicks
considering the results from the rank and organic clicks models.
As expected, we found that websites which were ranked higher,
had a higher online authority, and had a higher relevance to the
search query led to significant higher expected clicks. Specif-
ically, we find when rank is high (low), the expected number
of organic clicks is 37.97 (4.36), when online authority is high
(low), the expected number of organic clicks is 44.93 (8.67), and
when the relevance between the search query and the website
is high (low), the expected number of organic clicks is 47.99
(5.25).

13
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M. Nagpal, J.A. Petersen
Fig. 5. Moderating effects of informational search on relevance (A) and authority (B).
Interactions Effects
We also wanted to understand how the effects of search
type moderate the link between the online authority, relevance,
and the expected number of organic clicks. To evaluate these
interaction effects, we computed the expected number of clicks
considering the results from the rank and organic clicks models.
We provide the results of this analysis in Figs. 5 and 6.
We see in Fig. 5 that when the search query type is informa-
tional (vs. navigational or transactional), the expected number of
organic clicks is statistically not different regardless of whether
the content relevance is high versus low (9.521 vs. 8.574;
p > .10). Further, we see in Fig. 6 that when the search query
type is informational (vs. navigational or transactional), the
expected number of organic clicks is significantly higher when
the website has a higher online authority (44.158 vs. 1.848;
p < .01). This suggests that when searchers are looking for infor-
mational content about products in general, that is at the top
of the funnel of the customer journey, they are more likely
to click on websites which have the highest online author-
ity, even if the content is not as relevant to the exact search
query.
14
Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
We see in Fig. 5 that when the search query type is transac-
tional (vs. navigational or informational), the expected number
of organic clicks is significantly higher when the website has a
higher content relevance (52.738 vs. 5.228; p < .01). Further, we
see in Fig. 6 that when the search query type is transactional (vs.
navigational or informational), the expected number of organic
clicks is statistically not different whether the website has a
higher or lower online authority (11.132 vs. 10.135; p > .10).
This suggests that when searchers are looking for transactional
content about products they want to find and purchase, that is
at the middle-to-bottom of the funnel of the customer journey,
they are more likely to click on websites which have the highest
content relevance, even if the content is not from the website
with the highest online authority.
Looking at the results from Figs. 5 and 6 together, it suggests
that as customers move along the customer journey from the
top to the bottom of the purchase funnel, their decisions to click
on websites varies with regard to the degree that the website
is higher or lower on online authority and content relevance.
Specifically, searchers that are earlier in the search process are
more likely to value online authority to get general information
about retailers, brands, and/or products. But as the search process
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M. Nagpal, J.A. Petersen
Fig. 6. Moderating effects of transactional search on relevance (A) and authority (B).
progresses, searchers are more likely to value finding exactly
the retailer, brand, and/or product that best fits their needs (i.e.,
higher content relevance).
Implications to Marketing Theory and Practice
Keyword research forms an integral part of both SSA and
SEO. For SSA, firms select keywords for auction bids, whereas
in SEO, website content is built around the selected keywords to
target a certain set of search queries. Though significant research
has been done about keyword research in SSA, such literature
in SEO is scarce. This has led many SEO strategies to rely on
sets of common heuristics to select keywords for SEO. This can
be primarily attributed to the fact that data on organic clicks is
not very readily available and some of the metrics used in SEO
keyword research such as content relevance or search intent are
complicated and not easily measurable.
Thus, having obtained a dataset on the organic clicks and cer-
tain website characteristics from three different online firms, we
use the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) text mining approach
to measure the content relevance of a webpage specific to any
search query. The approach used in our paper is a more compre-
hensive method to measure content relevance when compared to
other common measures such as Levenshtein distance or general
15
Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
edit distance as it incorporates the semantic similarity of texts
in addition to the textual similarity measured by the existing
methods used. Further, we build a modeling framework to study
the effect of the measured search and website characteristics on
rank and organic clicks to understand how SEO strategies can
vary with search queries. Specifically, we study how key search
characteristics (search query popularity, search query competi-
tion, search query specificity, and search intent) as well as two
key retailer/website characteristics (content relevance and online
authority) affect the organic clicks a website receives for a search
query. The expected organic clicks can be used as a measure of
the effectiveness of a SEO campaign as it represents the number
of users which the SEO campaign attracts towards the web-
site. The findings from our model have implications for both
marketing researchers and practitioners in the field of SEO.
Implications to Theory
This paper enhances the research available in the field of
keyword research for SEO as it investigates the relationships
between search and website characteristics and the expected
rank and organic clicks. The modeling framework studies two
important parts of the organic click generation process. It studies
how the type of selected keyword for a given webpage influences
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M. Nagpal, J.A. Petersen
organic rank and then further studies how the rank a website
receives translates into organic clicks. It provides researchers
with a broad outlook on how these relationships work and
how understanding these relationships can help in selecting
appropriate keywords for content creation and optimization.
Additionally, our framework provides a more comprehensive
approach to measure important SEO metrics such as content
relevance and search intent.
We show that the type of keyword the firm selects to write
content about to target certain search queries not only influences
the rank directly, but it also influences the ranking process which
search engines use to order organic links. Results from our model
show that online authority (content relevance) is more important
for getting a higher rank for informational (transactional) search
queries. This is likely because users conducting informational
search queries have a lower awareness of relevance compared
to users conducting navigational or transactional search queries
(Rutz and Bucklin 2011). Users who conduct a generic informa-
tional search are at the early stage of awareness or information
gathering and would be less involved in the search process
(Jerath, Ma, and Park 2014; White, Dumais, and Teevan 2009).
Thus, they might not be aware of the brand or product, or when
they are, they might not be aware that the brand or product
is relevant for the search. As the main goal of such users is
to gather information, they would prefer to gain that informa-
tion from a well-known website having higher authority in that
area. However, when they move to a more advanced stage of
the online purchase process and conduct transactional or navi-
gational search queries, they tend to click on results much lower
in the sponsored list, spending more effort in finding relevant
links (Agarwal, Hosanagar, and Smith 2011) as their awareness
of relevance has increased (Rutz and Bucklin 2011). Thus, while
making the click decision, content relevance is more important
to users conducting transactional or navigational search queries,
whereas online authority is more important for users conducting
informational search queries.
Implications to SEO Practice
We study how the effectiveness of SEO strategies involv-
ing improvement of online authority and content relevance can
vary across various search intents. While improving online
authority is akin to brand-building and could be viewed as long-
term investment, increasing content relevance to selected search
queries can improve rank and organic clicks immediately. The
managerial importance of the paper stems from the fact that
keyword research is one of the primary methods used by SEO
marketers to enhance search traffic. The modeling framework in
this paper can be used by SEO practitioners to understand how
the characteristics of the selected search queries will affect the
expected clicks the firm gets. As attracting visitors to the website
is the first step towards getting more customers, this can serve
as a measure of the effectiveness of a SEO campaign. Thus, the
model provides guidance to identify the type of search charac-
teristics which would maximize the expected number of organic
clicks to their websites and select appropriate keywords to target
search queries accordingly.
16
Journal of Retailing xxx (xxx, xxxx) xxx–xxx
The paper sheds light on the moderating influence of search
intent on the effectiveness of writing relevant content as well as
the effectiveness of working on improving online authority. We
find that improving content relevance is more effective in get-
ting more clicks from for transactional search queries, whereas
improving online authority is more effective in getting clicks
for informational search queries. As content optimization (on-
page SEO) is a more short-run strategy compared to improving
online authority (off-page SEO), the finding suggests that a web-
site having a lower online authority would be better off writing
content about transactional (vs. informational or navigational)
search queries in order to increase their expected organic clicks.
This finding points out the importance of considering the intent
behind search queries when optimizing website content.
Limitations and Future Research
As with any empirical analysis there are several limitations
of our study. Our analysis is based on data from a single snap-
shot of search and click behavior where we focus on explaining
variation across search queries, websites, and domains. It would
be useful for future studies to examine these relationships using
data across multiple time periods to see whether changes in firm
strategies to target different types of search queries led to differ-
ences in the impact of content relevance on organic clicks, even
though website content changes are usually not frequent. Also,
as we use data for only a one-month period, the results may not
generalize to longer timelines or larger datasets. Future research
may want to study if these results hold for different types of
industries and over a longer timeline.
Further, our analysis is based on data from three retailers
(online retailer, culinary school, and urgent health care provider)
and while we included retailer fixed effects to capture differ-
ences in the level of clicks for each retailer, it is also important
to understand whether our findings for the other main effects
varied across these retailers. We did estimate the same model by
interacting the retailer fixed effects with each of the search and
website characteristics. We did not find any significant inter-
actions. This suggests for our sample that our main findings
held across each retailer. However, future research could inves-
tigate whether the impact of search or website characteristics on
organic clicks varies across different retailers.
As Google’s search results grow increasingly personalized,
SEO has become a challenge as location, previous searches,
and browser history now affect the results that users get. Our
model does not consider these localized and personalized factors
which affect search rankings. However, this should not affect the
main findings of this paper as we consider in our model certain
fundamental search query and website factors, the importance of
which is unlikely to vary much. Future research can incorporate
user demographic factors in order to control for localization and
personalization of search results.
Another limitation of our research is that we do not study the
financial impact of SEO strategies and only look at their impact
on organic clicks. As the purchase probability of the user varies,
a large number of organic clicks does not always mean financial
benefit for the firm as the user who visits the website may not
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M. Nagpal, J.A. Petersen
end up making a financial transaction. As the conversion rate or
the financial benefit from each click is unknown, we were unable
to incorporate this in our model. However, as visiting a website
is the first step towards making a purchase, the expected clicks
can be used as a measure of effectiveness of the SEO campaign.
Future research could extend on our findings by estimating the
financial impact of keyword selection strategies to target search
queries.
Funding
Financial support was provided through a grant from MSI
and its Young Scholars program.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary material related to this arti-
cle can be found, in the online version, at
doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2020.12.002.
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