Increasing the organic click-through rate of your pages in SERP has a significant impact on the growth of overall organic search traffic and the conversion of your users into customers. Search engine algorithms consider organic click-through rate as an indicator of website performance to appear in search results. Pages that have a higher click-through rate tend to rank higher in search results.

But working on the quality of your content, on-page and off-page SEO as well is essential for your pages to rank. As a general rule, once you are ranked on the first page of the SERP, you can expect a good organic click-through rate and then proceed to optimize certain elements of your pages to increase your organic click-through rate.

Even if you are ranked #1 for a high competition keyword, you will notice that you are not the only one attracting searchers’ attention to click on your links. Other SERP features, such as paid ads, knowledge graphs, and featured snippets, are also there to get searchers’ attention.

This means that in addition to high rankings, you need to perform certain activities to encourage searchers to click on your page and increase the organic click-through rate, or CTR.

In this article, we will review some of the best ways to increase the organic click-through rate (CTR) on your site.

What is the Organic Click-Through Rate?

Organic click-through rate (also known as organic CTR) is the percentage of clicks a page gets out of the total number of times your page appears (impressions) after a search query is made.

CTR = (clicks ÷ impressions) x 100

For example, if your web page appears 100 times in the search results for a particular keyword and 5 users clicked to see your page, the click-through rate is 5%.

The organic click-through rate represents the engagement and behavior of users with your web page, ads, etc. A high CTR is a good indication that users find your articles and ads useful and relevant which is an important ranking signal for the search algorithm.

Therefore, anything you do to improve it will have an impact on your ranking in the SERPS, which in turn will have a positive effect on increasing the organic traffic to your website.

How to Determine the Organic Click-Through Rate?

The easiest way to find out the average click-through rate for your website is to use Google Search Console. In your Google Search Console dashboard, click on the Performance tab, then select the average click-through rate and average position.

At the bottom of the detailed report, under the Queries tab, you’ll see the keywords you’re ranking for with average clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. If you switch to the Pages tab, you can see which keywords you are ranking for are on which page of your website.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the best practices for improving your click-through rates.

1. Research Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords have many benefits for your content marketing, SEO strategy, and increase the click-through rate. They are highly targeted search queries, so they are easier to rank for.

Generally, users search for long-tail keywords when they are in the final stages of the buying cycle, so their conversion rate is high. By using them, you can increase your website traffic, dominate search rankings and boost your conversions.

While common keywords have a high search volume and require a lot of effort and time to rank on these queries.  Also since they provide the initial information, offers less chance of getting a conversion. In order for the results generated for long-tail keywords to have a high CTR, they must meet the user’s intent very well.

Click here to try Jaaxy for free and boost your keyword research capabilities

Read more:

4 Best Keyword Research Tips to Improve Your Ranking

Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool Review

2. Write Catchy and SEO Friendly Titles

Your page title is the first thing a user sees when you rank in search results. This is what it looks like in the search results.

To write compelling headlines your title must have a few characteristics including the following

• Include the target keyword in the title to attract search engines and users are the keyword.
• Your title should summarize the purpose of your page in the best possible way.
• Your title should be catchy and attractive to get users’ attention and make them click. Given the importance of titles, you need to do your research to write a good one.

You can use a title analysis tool like CoSchedule to optimize your titles. 

3. Write Effective Meta-Descriptions

Writing well-thought-out and quality meta descriptions can be an effective way to drive favorable user behavior and increase your organic click-through rate. Meta descriptions help potential users better understand your content by indicating what they can expect and encourage them to click on a link.

Here is an example of the text that will appear in search results.

You need to write an effective meta description that is only 160 characters. But this can significantly increase your click-through rate. If you don’t write a description tag, search engines generate a phrase around the keyword query so that relevant context appears in the snippet, but it’s better for you to take control by showing the page’s strengths in your meta description.

Here are some good ways to write effective meta descriptions:

• Include the target keyword in the meta description to further show your reader that your page is compatible with their search intent.
• Write a description that is relevant to your user’s search intent.

Read more: 

Top 10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

On-Page SEO:  10 Key Ranking Factors Explained

4. Use Rich Snippets Schema Markup to Increase Your Visibility

The featured snippet is the most appropriate response displayed by Google in response to a user’s query. Search engines display featured snippets before any other organic result and soon attract users’ attention.

This makes your site an authoritative and trusted site, as Google chooses your website, out of hundreds of sites, to be at the top of the list. Search engines using Rich Snippets Schema markup display your content with additional information in the search results, making your page stand out from other results and increasing the click-through rate.

The purpose of rich snippets is to occupy extra space in the SERPs, in order to attract users’ attention. Having a featured snippet will definitely encourage users to click on your website. This structured data is written in a special format called Schema.org markup.

5. Create Articles With Images

Images play an important role by being included in infoboxes to increase your click-through rate. Make sure to include original and relevant visual content in as much content as possible. Images also increase engagement on all social media channels.

Images can help you simplify things. You can use images to summarize ideas or create appeal, and make the text easier to understand, which can help increase overall click-through rates. Complex statistics, reports, and data can often be difficult to understand and highlight key messages, but using charts and graphs to represent data can greatly simplify understanding the main message you are trying to convey.

There are some great tools out there that allow even those without professional design skills to create quality images. Consider trying a tool like Canva, which allows you to create great images for your blogs. Its drag-and-drop interface and ease of use make you feel like a design genius.

It has attractive stock images that you can use in your designs, and easily add other elements, such as text, banners, frames, and buttons.

Read more: 

13 Best Online Graphic Design Tools for All Skill Levels

6. Use Descriptive URLs

Your page URL is one of the elements that appear in your link preview that, by including a long tail keyword, can entice users to click. WordPress uses an SEO-friendly URL structure and automatically generates URLs based on the title of your post/page like this: 

https://example.com/le -title- of -your-article/

You can change this setting in WordPress under Settings – Permalinks. Also, the URL helps the user to build trust with your website by quickly reading your company name and keyword in the URL. To make the most of your blog post or page URLs and increase your click-through rate, try to: 

• Write URLs that are both clear and descriptive.
• Include your main keyword in the URL
• The shorter your URL, the better
•  Set up breadcrumb trails (to allow your user to see the structure of your website and the location of URLs within it). This helps the user understand that the answer is relevant to their needs and increases the chances that they will click on your result to explore it further.
•  Categorize or subcategorize your URL correctly. This can impact search results, as it adds more keyword opportunities and increases visibility in search engines.

7.  Improve local SEO to Increase Click-Through Rates

Local SEO allows you to target regional audiences which makes your result more relevant and increases click-through rates. To achieve this, register your business on Google My Business which literally puts you on the map.

When users search for keywords related to your business, your location on the map is displayed above the search results. By redirecting users to Google Maps, your website, hours of operation, location, directions, and phone number appear.

 8. Update Older Articles to Increase Click-Through Rates

Updating older articles on your website that have dropped in rankings can help you improve their rankings and consequently the click-through rate of your website.

9. Analyze Your Results Frequently and Perform A/B Tests to Increase Your Click-Through Rate

the click-through rate of your pages or ads is the best indicator to evaluate which types of ads, or articles, and keywords are successful for you to reproduce these techniques on other pages. You can also find out which pages are not getting clicks and work on improving them so that they get a higher click-through rate.

The more your keywords and articles are related to each other and to your business, the more likely a user is to click and search with your keyword. Google Search Console helps you know which pages are getting the most clicks and which are not performing well.

In Google Search Console, click on the performance report and then under the Queries tab.  You will find the report that shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position in the SERPs.

Then go to PAGES and select the URL you want to analyze. With these reports, you can run A/B tests on titles and descriptions on social media to increase the organic click-through rate for the keyword in question.

10. Optimize Site Speed

Your page load time affects your search engine rankings. Your site’s performance in terms of load time can affect the user experience of your pages. Optimizing your site’s speed is therefore essential to improve the user experience and increase the click-through rate of your site. 

 It is, therefore, necessary to make sure that your site loads as fast as possible. If your site’s loading speed is too slow, the risk is that the visitor will not actually land on your page. There are many free tools to check your site speed.

You can evaluate your site speed with online tools such as PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse that not only display your site speed data but also give you suggestions on how to improve your site speed.

Conclusion

Organic search traffic is free customers coming to your business online and the only way to receive this traffic is to get clicks from search engines. It is also important to keep in mind that bringing traffic to your website is often not enough to grow your online business. Improving your click-through rate will have a huge impact on your business if you focus on the user’s needs.