To do this, the most important thing is that you are already getting impressions in the SERPs and, of course, some traffic on those URLs to be optimized. However, regardless of the position you are occupying in the search results, if you manage to attract the user’s attention, the CTR percentage will probably increase and with it the visits. 

I don’t mean by this that if you improve your CTR you will also improve your ranking. In fact, John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) assures that it is not a determining factor for positioning in the SERP rankings, since these are always in motion: 

What we do know is that if you improve your CTR % it is very likely that your traffic will also grow.

In fact, on one of my sites, I started implementing these 5 tips in the first week of March. 

It is a website that: 

• Is 2 years old. 
• Has not been worked from the external links profile. 
• It has no brand searches. 
• It has only been worked onsite with interlinking and content optimization. 

The results? From the last week of March I started to notice the growth and, today, comparing the last 3 months vs. the previous period there is a growth of 5.8%:

What is CTR and why is it so important in SEO? 

The CTR (Click Through Rate) is a metric that determines the percentage of clicks you receive in search results. 

To calculate it, the number of clicks you receive is divided by the number of impressions and the result is multiplied by 100. 

For example, if you receive 60 clicks on a URL that had 1500 impressions, the calculation would be as follows: 

60 / 1500= 0.04 x 100 = 4%

Although you could do it manually, it is quite easy to obtain this calculation thanks to the Google Search Console tool. 

Entering the “Performance” tab you will see that on the right side, at the top, you will have the following data: 

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Average position. 

By default the clicks and impressions will be activated, so you will only have to click on “CTR” to see your history. 

But why is it so important in SEO? Users have several options to choose which website to enter when they search on Google or other search engines. You don’t need to be in the first place to get their attention: if you manage to match their search intent and catch their attention, the user will be yours. 

5 tips to improve the %CTR of your website in the SERPs 

1. Identify opportunities to improve %CTR using Search Console

You can detect opportunities using Google Search Console as your main tool.

To do this, activate Impressions, Clicks, and CTR in the top panel. 

Then, follow the next steps: 

• Go to the “Pages” tab in the bottom section.
• Filter the URLs with the highest number of impressions. 
• See which URL’s have a %CTR below your average. In my case, below 11%.
• Export this data and keep only the URLs with a low %CTR. 
• Examine how these URLs appear in the search results for the queries in which they are positioned. 

Having all this you will have already detected the URLs with more possibility of improvement.

All the CTRs highlighted in yellow have a good amount of impressions, but few clicks. This is where we can implement other recommendations such as the ones I will mention below. 

2. Implements structured data (Schema.org)

Structured data, also called Rich Snippets, is a standard format in which we indicate to the search engine, in a more “digested” way, all the necessary information that we show on our pages. 

Depending on the type of content we show, and depending on the web format we have (News, Ecommerce, Recipes, informative Blogs…) there are different types of structured data to implement. 

Thanks to this there are more possibilities to position in “The zero result”. 

When searching for a recipe, before reaching the classic organic results, we come across a module in the “0” result. Not only the image is displayed, but also the overall user rating for a recipe. 

The same happens if we search for very specific products. In the search results we will see that for some queries it shows us: 

• Price
• Stock (available or out of stock). 
• Reviews.
• Number of reviews

Appearing in these modules is possible thanks to the structured data. Here are some resources according to the type of content/services/products you have on your website:

• News: https://schema.org/NewsArticle
• Products (eCommerce): https://schema.org/Product
• Recipes: https://schema.org/Recipe
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): https://schema.org/FAQPage
• Blog articles (informative): https://schema.org/BlogPosting
• Lists: https://schema.org/ItemList

 If you want to implement them manually I recommend using TechnicalSEO’s JSON-LD generator.

To understand how to automate the generation of this structured data click here.  

3. Inform about the advantages and benefits you offer to users

While this is a recommendation that usually goes very well in the world of eCommerce if you apply it creatively on websites with other types of content it can go quite well. 

A technique that is often seen in some online stores is to include the discount percentage, payment methods/facilities, and some words like “offers” or “promotions”. 

Let’s see the following example:

The URL in the first place of the ranking uses words like “Cheaper” in the title, or “Discounts”. The use of this language is aligned to the intention of the user, who already from the search is using the term “offer flights”.

Now, we have already tested with a 100% transactional keyword. But what about other more informative keywords? A good example to show this is the term “dollar blue” in Argentina. Although it is a stable search at trend level, being a value that varies from day to day, some media use methods such as: 

• Include the date in the title and meta description. 
• Mentioning the updated value. 
• Use words like “today” or “updated”. 

It is up to you to use your creativity to implement these changes in your titles and meta description to improve the %CTR on your site. 

4. Emojis and symbols in your Title and Meta description?

A method that has been applied in different sectors is the use of symbols and emojis to attract clicks from users. 

From my point of view, this method does not apply to any type of business. Therefore, before implementing it, think if it fits your brand language and target audience. 

To do this, you can segment and look at your audience’s age, gender and interests. Based on this, and the product/service you offer, decide whether it is worth implementing it or not. 

In case your answer is a resounding “yes”, let’s see what some SERPs look like with emojis and symbols:

Some of the webs that I usually use to obtain these emojis and symbols are: 

• https://es.piliapp.com/symbol/
• https://emojipedia.org/ 

5. Improve your site’s URL architecture

This tip is applicable not only to improve CTR but also so that search engines can semantically interpret your content. 

A clean URL that corresponds to your internal architecture gives better signals to the user that what they will find in the content is really what they are looking for. 

To do this: 

• Avoid using numbers and special characters in your URL. 
• Segment with “/” each section of the web according to depth. Example: /sneakers/nike/women/. 
• Avoid dates in your URL. 

Final Recommendations 

Monitoring before and after the implementations will be essential to see the progress you can have. Therefore, I recommend you to export month by month the CTR % of the URLs to which you have applied the changes and, from there, compare them to see their evolution.

If you have any doubt or want to add any advice, leave it here below in the comments.

La entrada 5 tips to improve your website’s CTR in SERPs aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

In this post, we are going to see how to make a CTR table according to the positioning of your site. Additionally, we are going to segment those CTR by brand and non-brand results.

Before we start, let’s see why a generic table of CTRs by rank is not always accurate.

1. Different SERP layouts: Click-through rates tend to vary for information pages, e-commerce, etc. because the page that Google shows as a search result for a hotel site is not the same as for a news site (for example). A search for hotels is going to show a big map in the SERP and that affects the CTR of the first place, second place, etc.
2. Different categories: Beyond the SERP layout, some categories have a more or less tech-savvy audience and the behavior of a 70-year-old user in a SERP is not the same as that of a 13-year-old.
3. Different branding weight: The brand term of some companies weighs more than others, for example: if someone searches for “mercadolibre cell phones”, it is clear that he/she is looking to buy through MeLi. However, if someone searches for “Nike sneakers”, they may not necessarily be looking for a result from Nike’s official site.
4. Different Title Structures: A page can rank first but not get all the clicks it could get because of an “ugly title structure”. For example, a title with only one word and no branding.
5. Title content: Some modifications can be made to a title to get more clicks, for example adding the specific keyword that is being searched, adding a number, a percentage, a yellow keyword, or even adding emojis. The content of the title is also a factor that catches the eye and then the click.
6. Presence of an optimized Meta Description: Just like the page title, the Meta Description plays an important role in the SERP CTR. So much so, that Google can display a text (or text summary!) of the page if it considers that it better satisfies the user’s search.
7. Etc.

*To see hard metrics about click-through rates in Google SERPs, we recommend this analysis.

I think with these factors it’s clear that we can’t put all sites in the same bag regarding CTR vs. ranking in Google. Let’s see how to get a table with the values 100% related to our site.

1. Add Google Search Console data source

The first step is to feed Google Data Studio with the data source that contains all the information about our site. To do this, go to Resource > Manage added data sources. Then click on add a data source.

Next, we add Google Search Console as a source of data:

Once the connector is selected, we will choose the site from the list of verified properties we have in the Search Console, then click on Impression of the website and then Connect.

The result should be a list with the default fields for a Search Console property:

2. Create a calculated field for brand keywords

Before we start plotting the data, let’s do a little feature engineering. Feature engineering consists of creating new data from existing data.

To make a new calculated field from Data Studio, we have to click on the add a field button.

The name of this field will be Branded, but it can be anything you want, the formula will search inside the Query field (the one with the keyword that brought traffic to the site) and if a regular expression containing the brand name (in this case misitio) is met then it returns “Brand”, otherwise it returns “Non-brand”.

note: instead of ‘misitio’, you have to put the brand name of your site.

3. Create a calculated field for truncated average positioning

Similar to the previous step, we are going to create a calculated field again, but this time we are going to truncate the average position number. Search Console is the only rank tracker that gives us positioning information with decimals, unfortunately for this report, this information is not useful, so we are going to truncate the values. This means that an average positioning of 1.7 will be considered a first position.

As there is no function to truncate, we are going to round the numbers down with the FLOOR() function, we are going to call this calculated field Average Position Trunc.

Click on save.

4. Create a table and complete it with our data
5. Configure the table

Once the table is created, we have to configure it to show the data we need. In our case, we break down the data by day and then by Query so that we do not agglomerate the average ranking and average CTR in a single value (the average ranking of the period was X and the average CTR of the period was Y). To break down the data by day, click on the calendar icon next to the date dimension assigned to the chart.

In our case, we will select to view only the data for the last 3 months. This is the period that Google Search Console displays by default when opening the performance report. To configure the period of data that will be displayed, click on Custom, within the Default Period section. Then select This quarter and click on Apply.

6. Export to a CSV

Because Data Studio does not allow us to see the truncated average ranking as a dimension (since it is a number it only shows it as a metric), we cannot filter by ranking. This is why we have to export the table data to Google Sheets to further shape our numbers.

To export the data, click on the large View button at the top right and then on the three dots above the table. Then select the Export to Spreadsheets option.

7. Editing data in Google Sheets with a pivot table

Finally, let’s take the average of all the CTRs for each position.

First, we convert the CTR columns to percentage format: click on the Site CTR column and then go to the Format > Number > Percentage menu.

Now let’s create that pivot table!

Go to the menu Data > Pivot Table and then click on Accept

Once we are viewing the pivot table, we have to configure it by clicking on:

• Rows > Add: Average Position Trunc (ascending and without totals)
• Columns > Add: Branded (without totals)
• Values > Add: Site CTR (add by AVERAGE)

And that’s it! The result should look something like this:

Conclusion

Several insights can be gleaned from this table:

• The rank 1 non-brand for this site is 10% higher than the generic 30 something.
• The site is well-positioned for brand terms as nothing ranks on the 2nd page.
• Brand in rank 1 is twice as high as non-brand for the same rank
• Brand in rank 2 is triple than non-brand for the same rank
• The non-brand CTR of rank 2 + rank 3 is equivalent to a first-rank
• etc.

This table also allows us to make sales projections for SEO. If you haven’t read this post yet, we invite you to take a look at it.

No more using generic CTR tables. Make the table for your site today! We hope this post has helped you. As always, good rankings!

La entrada How to calculate the organic CTR of YOUR site aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.