Business

How to Increase Organic CTR?

By Ryan Bradman | November 25, 2022

Table of Contents

CTR is one of the popular terms in keyword searching. A high click-through rate is one of the main things that companies aim for when looking to optimize their SEO performance.

How to accomplish this? It may seem overwhelming at first, but rest assured: There are a number of concrete steps you can follow to try to maximize your results.

What is CTR and organic CTR in particular?

Click-through Rate

Click-through Rate is a particular ratio that represents the number of times people search for, then follow through to a given site. The number of times that a site link appears in a given search is also known as the number of “impressions” that it gives. A CTR of 10%, for example, means that people followed through to your page once every ten times the results appeared in a search engine results page, or SERP.

Having a good CTR is important to generating improved web traffic because it allows you to gain traction without having to think about your rankings per se.

If, for example, a given search puts you in the fifth ranking on a results page, you can increase your site traffic by creating conditions for your target market to follow through more often without having to worry about reaching for the top spot.

In fact, recent evidence has proven that paid ads are receiving less traffic as people tend to view them simply as spam and look past them. Therefore, it could be to your advantage to actually not pay for advertising these days. Customers are getting savvier along with the growth of technology, and we shouldn’t take this for granted.

What makes a CTR organic?

Organic searches are ones that result in unpaid listings. Therefore, if you’re not paying for your search results, you’ll have to think carefully about how to maximize your results by your own means.

Organic SEO is sometimes known as ethical SEO because it relies upon concerted methods of organizing a page, rather than payment. (In fact, there is also a concept called “unethical SEO,” which includes such practices as Black Hat SEO in which a company might try to manipulate search engines to gain higher rankings).

How to increase organic CTR?

There are a number of things you can do to optimize your CTR, and to maximize your results, they should be done in order. Here are some of the most effective.

Determine where you stand before you start making changes

In order to figure out what you need to do to improve, the first thing you will need is to figure out exactly where your page stands to begin with.

One important element in determining what you need to do to improve your performance is determine where your lowest organic CTR is. This can be done by means of utilizing the Google Search Console. It will tell you where your impressions stand and you will be able to see the variance among them. This will show you where your strong and weak points lie.

Work on your meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are additional pieces of information that appear in your search results following your meta tags. They consist of approximately 156 characters and are intended to summarize your page’s content.

While the tags themselves are also important, site creators often neglect their meta descriptions. It is suggested that meta descriptions themselves include keywords and bold, clear descriptions.

Construct your URL carefully

Your actual URL might seem secondary in importance to your site’s content, but it too plays a role in SERP results. Experts suggest having clear, descriptive words in your URL (eg “businessnewyork.com/intro” rather than “bizny.com/?#1!^”. The more effort people have to put into memorizing a URL, the less likely they will be to want to go back to it.

Include a variety of different types of content

As the competition for web traffic increases, people expect to see a range of content types when they click on any given site. In addition, sites that do not have variety in them tend to get downgraded and have a lower CTR rate. Therefore, it would be to your advantage to add blogs, video posts, podcasts, and animation as much as possible. There are tools for YouTube SEO, for example, that you can utilize in assessing the strength of your videos. And not only should content be varied in type, you should make a concerted effort to keep up with the trends in themes, language, style, etc.

Fix keyword cannibalization issues

Another issue that you might be facing with your page is that of keyword “cannibalization.” What this refers to is the incidence of having too many similar keywords spread out over a given page. This causes confusion within the search engines as they do not know how to rank the words on your page. As a result, all of your keywords end up with a lower ranking than one or more of them might if they were clearer and more orderly.

Keyword cannibalization can be fixed by several means:

Finding new keywords. This is the most obvious solution. Consolidating similar words or finding new ones altogether will help to reduce confusion with regard to words that are too similar to one another. Find new ones with Rank Tracker.
Restructuring your entire site. In addition to having an excess of similar words, your pages themselves might be causing problems and therefore your entire site might need restructuring. As far as the search engines are concerned, pages that look similar are competing with one another in the rankings. What you might not realize is that your pages, if not organized correctly, might be competing with each other and thereby watering down the strength of each of them. Try consolidating similar pages into single ones for more efficient, concise, and effective content.
Ensure 301 redirects are implemented correctly. 301 redirects are signals that automatically direct users from one URL to another. These are used in cases such as redirecting from an old site to a new one. When a site has gone out of usage, a 301 redirect can automatically take people to the new site without them having to retype the new URL. You need to be cautious when implementing one of these redirects as incorrect implementation can cause your ranking to be downgraded.

Implement schema markups

Another related change that you can make is schema markup (otherwise known as “structured markup”). Schema are a set of tags that get added to your pages to interpret your text content to the search engines. The tags that they utilize are called microdata, and they are included along with other tags in search results..

Schema include many of the same types of tags that we might use in everyday tagging of people and places in many types of posts. They include such things as people, places, businesses, etc. You can find instructions for how to implement a schema markup yourself by simply searching online. Including the correct tags will help improve your CTR substantially.

Use long keywords

One way to make your keywords stand out against the crowd is to use “long keywords” or “long-tail keywords.” Long-tail keywords are keywords that consist of three or more words that people search for when they are looking for something specific. Because of their high level of specificity, search engines have an easier time ranking them than shorter keyword phrases. In fact, it is estimated that these types of keywords have more than a 200% chance of conversion than their shorter counterparts. Nevertheless, you should always check keyword difficulty (KD) before picking it up, even though it’s long-tail keyword that seems to rank pretty high.

If you have a specific product or service to offer (or even if you don’t, but are looking to increase your traffic among one or more particular groups), it would be to your advantage to utilize as your CTR rate will be significantly higher.

Limitations of CTR/additional considerations

While knowing your CTR can be extremely helpful, it is also important to note that it isn’t an all-inclusive way of measuring your company’s web performance. There can also be other ways that your viewers get to the same information, so if you’re looking to do an accurate analysis of your company’s performance you should also include other methods in your analysis.

You should also keep in mind that there are different ways to count click rates. One is by counting the overall number of clicks, in which any given person can click multiple times, and each click will be counted. Another version is called “unique clicks,” and this measures the number of different people that click on a specific link. While both of these indicators are important, they definitely measure different types of things, so it is good to keep this in mind.

Review all your measures at the end

Once you’ve gone through all the above-mentioned steps, look back to make sure you’ve gotten through everything and that all of your research was conducted accurately. When you’ve gotten the procedure down, it will be easier to implement on subsequent occasions, and you’ll have fewer problems to correct in the future, as well.