It’s easy to overlook your organic click-through rates on Google. After all, you’ve probably been lulled into believing over most of your marketing life that they’re not as important as other SEO metrics, such as inbound links.
However, there are a lot of really great reasons you should work on improving your organic CTRs, not the least of which is its impact on your rankings. In fact, we’ve found evidence that if you want to move up a spot in the rankings, improving your organic CTR by 3% will do it.
But even if you don’t believe that organic CTR can affect your SEO rankings, it’s a really good idea to work on increasing your click-through rate. A high organic CTR in Google or any search engine means you get more traffic from the same ranking (isn’t that the point of rankings in the first place?). What’s more, higher CTR pages tend to have higher conversion rates, too. Increasing your CTR by 2x will increase your conversion rate by 50%.
In this way, organic CTR is actually a super important building block – a foundational must-have for more successful SEO overall. There’s a ton of evidence out there that points to CTR’s importance, some of it even coming from the almighty Google itself.
It’s not something you can sit back and ignore.
But how can you make real, measurable and lasting improvements in your organic CTRs for SEO? What SEO tests can you run to try to improve organic clicks?
In my pursuit to answer this question, I joined forces with the exceptionally talented Brian Dean from Backlinko. Together, we’ve developed an awesome new collection of the eleven most effective ways to boost your organic CTR and compiled them into an easy-to-follow infographic.
If you’re like most marketers I know, you don’t have time to dink around with optimizations we already know don’t work.
For example, Microsoft has proven that descriptive URLs perform better than generic ones – 25% better, as a matter of fact. Are you seriously already losing 25% of clicks just because your team got lazy with URLs? There’s an easy win if you can turn that around.
Another stupid simple trick is to get rid of your keyword-heavy titles. They’re super boring and don’t inspire anyone to click. I mean, look at these – so blah.
You need to get creative with your titles. Speaking of titles, there are all kinds of recommendations out there about them, too:
“Make them long and descriptive!”
“Keep them short and punchy!”
“Try these 94 different ways to make a title!”
Ain’t nobody got time for that. If you want to give your page an instant CTR kickstart, use this PROVEN title format:
The Format – The Emotional Hook – The Content Type – Your Subject
You can see exactly what this looks like, plus all 11 epic tips illustrated, in the infographic below. Keep it handy! You’re going to use this guide for reference as you continually optimize your pages over the coming months with higher organic CTRs in mind:
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