There is enough evidence that optimizing click-through-rate (CTR) can help in increasing organic traffic. Just one of those studies, conducted by DigitalBerge, shows how optimizing CTR helps increase traffic and leads. Find out why organic CTR matters and learn about 7 tips to double your organic traffic by optimizing it.
Importance of Organic CTR
Before you study about the importance of CTR, it will help to understand that having high ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) is great, but all high rankings don’t mean high volume of targeted traffic to your site. It is more important to have high number of people who click through to your pages and don’t bounce back immediately. You want to have visitors who are going to spend more time on your website and convert.
Even Google agrees that it matters:
- How many times your URLs get clicked in search results?
- How many times you are able to convert?
So how do you optimize your clicks?
Her are 7 amazing strategies to help you double your organic traffic by optimizing your CTR.
1. Include Images in All Your Posts
It is recommended to include engaging images in all your posts. Studies show that images can increase CTR by over 40% in emails and they boost engagement on social media channels.
While you cannot include a thousand words in a search preview, you can certainly make an impression with images. Make sure to always use original, highly relevant, and engaging visual content.
2. Create Attention-Grabbing Page Titles
The page title has a huge impact on your search result display. It can help in grabbing people’s attention and giving them a clear idea of what the page is about.
Follow these tips to optimize your CTR and increase your organic traffic:
- Write titles for human readers and not for search engine crawlers. Focus on user experience and avoid creating titles that seem to be written only for the robots. The title should also have a focus point and set off the right emotions.
- Make sure the title is unique, just like the content copy.
- Test titles with social media and PPC to find out what works best.
3. Create Powerful Meta Descriptions
Create a short but engaging description. It should explain what your page is about, while creating the curiosity to seek more information. The Meta description should push searchers to click-through to get the desired information.
Description is not a direct ranking factor, but it does play an important role in getting the click. Follow these tips to optimize your meta descriptions:
- Include your primary keyword
- Include a powerful and engaging call-to-action
- Follow the 50/50 split rule
The 50/50 split rule requires you to include main keywords and call-to-action in the first half of the description and additional information in the rest.
4. Add Structured Data
Structured data is an important element of the rich and interactive content in SERPs. It involves marking your page with data tags that provide additional information. Structured data allows search engines to ‘understand’ the tags and provide visual elements to SERPs. Some of the best ways you can add structured data include:
- Display your Reviews & Ratings
- Add additional product information such as product price, availability, image, and date published.
5. Use Featured Snippets
Featured snippets help your pages to appear and stand out in the top search results. The fact that they stand out, helps in driving high click-throughs.
It is recommended to secure the maximum-possible snippets when optimizing your pages for organic CTR.
- Target the full snippet
- Target the image spot if you find it hard to beat the competition
- Appear for other rich results such as image carousals, job postings, and tweets
6. Create Descriptive URLs
Another strategy to optimize your CTR is to create descriptive URLs. It is important to realize that page URLs provide great opportunity for adding long-tail keywords. And it is going to appear on your link preview and encourages clicks if searchers find it relevant to their query.
The other most important elements of the URL that affect search results are:
- Category
- Path
- Length
When publishing pages, make sure that they are properly categorized. This creates more keyword opportunities and increase search engine visibility. SEO seems to have become increasingly complex, but it is still possible to predict visibility and organic traffic with accuracy. When building your SEO strategy, make sure that your focus is not just on the traffic, but also on increasing the CTR.
7. Create Localized Content
Today, people are searching for information on both desktops and mobile devices. The growth of mobile search has brought major changes in how search results get presented. What people search on their mobile devices depends a lot on where they are. So proximity has become an increasingly important factor in search rankings.
So if you want to optimize your CTR, you should localize your content. This, however, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t target non-localized SEO.
So follow all these 7 tips to grow your organic traffic by optimizing CTR.
