The ultimate goal of any website is to rank on the top of the SERP, which can be made possible by implementing advanced SEO strategies and hiring professional SEO content writing services. The effectiveness and success of such efforts can be measured through the organic click-through rate (CTR).
To measure the organic CTR, you need to find the percentage of the number of times people click on your website by the number of times people actually come across your website. For example, if you rank for a given keyword that is searched 100 times in a given month and your website is clicked by ten people in that period, then your CTR is 10%. The higher the click-through rate, the higher will be the organic traffic coming to your site.
You must be already aware of how Google considers more than 200 ranking factors before pushing a website on the top of the SERP, and organic CTR happens to be one of them. Pages with higher than average CTR are expected to get a ranking boost. The organic CTR of a website is influenced by several factors, which we will discuss in this post.
12+ Proven Ways to Enrich Your Organic Click Through Rate 2024
1. Look For Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are beneficial to make almost any SEO strategy successful. By adding more long-tail keywords to your web content, you can easily increase the chances of ranking your website. This process is known as “keyword clustering,” where instead of just targeting the primary keyword, you focus on all the related long-tail keywords alongside.
By using this keyword cluster, you can improve your chances to rank your website at the top of the SERP.Long-tail keywords also have less competition, so you always have a better chance to rank.
2. Write Impactful Meta Descriptions
A meta description can make or break a link to be clicked. It explains what a link is all about and what to expect when clicked on it. Writing clear, concise, and impactful meta descriptions can increase the click-through rate for a webpage and boost traffic.
The meta description character limit is 160 at present, and you need to be as creative as possible to explain what the page is all about within the set limit. You can check the preview of your meta description, like how it will appear in searches on WordPress with Yoast plugin or free SEO tools like seomofo.com. Adding a short call to action (CTA) always helps in attracting the audience to click.
3. Implement Structured Data
Structured data is responsible for showing up the informative infoboxes on the top of the SERP. They make our lives much easier because we don’t need to click on a site to read the entire content, and can get the necessary information from the excerpt on the top. This is useful, particularly if we are looking for something specific like the year WW-II took place or the year when the movie Titanic was released in the US.
Structured data or schema markup helps search engines to understand the content of your site better and enhance your ranking in the search engines by showcasing the necessary information when someone makes an online query. Even if you rank below 5th or 6th position in the SERP, if your content shows up in position 0, i.e., on the featured snippet, then you can expect more CTR than sites that rank in position 1 or 2 of the SERP.
4. Use Images in Posts
Pictures are essential in improving click-through rates and, of course, engagement. According to Vero, images increase the CTR in emails by 42%. Visual content is going to dominate the future of content and what could be a better way to utilize it than to use it in your content as much as you can. Also, remember to use original content and use Alt tags for images. Content with relevant images also plays an integral part in the featured snippets.
5. Create Simplified Titles
The first thing that you notice in any online search result is the title. Ensure to keep your titles simple yet engaging. If you want to boost personal branding, you can also add your site name at the beginning or end of your title. No matter how much you like to put it up, make sure you are doing it right. If the titles and headlines don’t urge users to click or read, then you need to reevaluate your mistakes and try framing better ones.
When you run Google Ads or Facebook ad campaigns, you can actually measure how your headline is performing. You can try tweaking the titles and headlines to see if there is an improvement in the CTR. This will also give you a clear idea of how well are your titles and headlines performing. If you don’t see a significant improvement in the CTR after a few tweaks, a safe bet would be to hire professional SEO content writing services.
6. Use Descriptive URLs
Descriptive URLs are real CTR boosters. The URL of your webpage is the perfect opportunity to use long-tail keywords. It is one of the first elements that a person notices while looking at an online search result. While writing a blog post or publishing web pages, it is important to categorize everything properly. This allows a place for more keyword placement and also boosts search engine visibility. It also makes it evident to the visitors that they are looking at a selected item page from a broad product category on your website. On WordPress, you can set the URL path in the Permalinks setting.
7. Use Effective Content Format
Effective content may not necessarily denote content that’s well written. It can also indicate the way content is presented. Very few people have the patience to read through a long-form content when they are in a hurry, a listicle serves them better. Listicles perform better than other forms of content. Thus, try to present your content in a listicle format to increase the CTR. This will also increase the chances of ranking your content in the featured snippets.
8. Optimize Site Speed
Site speed is an essential factor in determining the success of a CTR. If your web page loads slowly, people will get annoyed a leave before exploring what’s in for them. In mobile, little wait time from 1 to 5 seconds can increase the bounce rate by 90%.
(Image Source: stanventures.com)
Site speed is also a determining factor for page rank, and hence you must be very careful about making your website fast and reliable. There are numerous free tools available online that allow you to check site speed. Some of the common ways in which site speed can be improved by compressing website images, reducing server response time, and minimizing HTTP requests.
9. Compare Your Mobile Vs. Desktop Experience
When it comes to analyzing the CTR of a website, ensure to check for both mobile and desktop versions. What is working for the desktop version of your website may not necessarily work for the mobile version, as well. Make sure to have your website optimized for both desktop and mobile and check whether the loading time is proper for both the versions. Also, look for broken web pages, slow-loading images, and other such issues that may affect the click-through rate of the website.
You can compare the CTR in desktop and mobile easily with the help of free SEO tools and find out the issues. If you cannot find any significant problems within a page, try looking at the meta tags. Make sure that the meta title and meta description for a given webpage is not too long to fit in the portrait mode in mobiles and tablets.
10. Analyze Current CTR & Take Action
Another fundamental way to enrich your organic click-through rate is to analyze the current CTR and find the average CTR on your website. Any web page that is getting a less than average CTR must be analyzed thoroughly and tweaked for meta tags, headlines, images, and content if necessary.
11. Get in Google’s Knowledge Graph
(Image Source: Screenshot from Google )
Getting your business listed in Google’s knowledge graph will work in your favor. If you run a local business, you are most likely to have your business listed in Google Places or Local listings. Google may take information from those pages and form a knowledge graph for your business with details like what your business is about, the names of the business partners, link to social profiles, etc.
With your business listed on the Google Knowledge Graph, you can expect a higher click-through rate and increase the traffic to your site. The Google knowledge graph is a more advanced form of Google’s rich snippet.
12. Compare With Competitors
If you still feel that your webpages are underperforming in terms of CTR and traffic than your competitors, it’s time to see what is causing this in the first place. Most of the content that receives high CTR for a given search query has the meta tags, headlines, and content in sync with each other and trying to accomplish a purpose (informational/promotional) depending on the nature of the search. Make sure that your content is also in sync with each other, and the keywords are appropriately used.
The organic click-through rate is the natural traffic coming to your website to browse a webpage. You have to keep experimenting with your SEO strategies from time to time to see changes in the CTR. If you aren’t very proficient in SEO and content tactics, you can seek help from blog writing services and SEO experts to get the work done professionally.
Hi Jitendra, as SERP results show random descriptions picked from the content related to search keywords, how exactly does writing catchy meta descriptions help grab CTR? kindly suggest if there are any ways to make google show manually entered descriptions.
Thanks for this article! This useful guide helps me a lot for getting organic traffic & clicks! as a beginner, it helps me a lot. thanks for sharing.
Your guide really helps beginners like me to bring some initial organic traffic and clicks. Tips for website optimization is appreciated. Thanks for this awesome post.
Nice post introduced how you can boost organic search result in 2020.