An Organic Click-Through-Rate can be subjective and can vary widely until you have other types of data to compare with. According to recent research on organic CTR, there is an average of 71.33% of searches that result in a page one organic click. More than half of the viewers tend to click on the top three results. It is the percentage of searchers that click on a search engine result.
What is Click Through Rate (CTR)
Organic CTR is largely based on the ranking position and is also influenced by a result’s title tag, its description, URL, and the presence of Rich Snippets. Organic click-through rate or organic CTR is the percentage of people that click on the search engine result.
The rate of the organic CTR or how high your organic CTR can get depends on how you rank on your SERPs. Other factors that influence the CTR include the headline, meta tag description, URL, and also if your result is a Rich Snippet. The organic click-through rate is the number of impressions that would result in a click.
If your article ranks on the first page of Google for a keyword that has almost 2000 to 3000 monthly searches but has generated only two to three clicks the CTR would rate to 0.1 percent.
A high CTR would mean that the searchers find the content provided by you to be relevant that causes them to click.
When it comes to optimizing any kind of campaign, generating leads, or urging a prospect to take the desired action, you need to make the content relevant for the user. The organic click-through rate can be increased in the following ways:
- Research long-tail keywords
- The long-tail keywords are a vital part of the SEO strategy
- Create a post with images
- The meta descriptions should be effective
- The title formats have to be simplified
- Localise your content
How to Calculate Click-Through-Rate?
To calculate the click-through-rate or the CTR there are three important data that you need to download from Google Search Console (GSC). These data are the keywords that your site ranks for the number of clicks that are generated, the number of impressions, and the rank of positioning the data. Then you can divide the total of the impressions received at each rank level.
There are a few steps that you can follow to calculate the CTR:
Step 1: From the GSC you have to extract the keyword data that your website ranks for. There are several tools that you can use to extract your data. With the GSC console, you can extract the keywords that you have ranked in the past three months. You can also use Google data studio. With Google data studio you can access a ton of data.
Step 2: Some keywords are biased. These are examples of branded keywords. These kinds of keywords affect your search results. You should remove these keywords before calculating your CTRs.
When you are calculating the click-through-rate your data needs to be clean. The branded keywords should be removed. Branded keywords have a higher CTR than normal keywords. Since the user or the searcher is intentionally looking for this particular keyword, it can easily throw off your CTR averages. The unbranded keywords are more evenly distributed in the Google SERPs, thus it is easier for the user and the searcher to calculate the click-through-rate.
Some results are called SERP features. These keywords do not have traditional organic results. The most popular of these features is called snippets. They are also known as the paid search or the knowledge graph. You can also try to remove these kinds of keywords from your data to avoid these keywords from throwing off your CTR average.
Step 3: The user should locate the highest impression levels for each data that you collect. Google does not accurately report data for keywords that have a low impression. They tend to over-report the CTR for low impression terms. For convenience, it is better to remove them from your report.
Step 4: Based on the dataset and its size, you can decide on how you would group your queries in position.
Step 5: The final step of calculating the click-through-rate is to create your CTR curves. You can do it with the help of a graph. On the X-axis you can place the position value and you can place the click-through rate values on the Y-axis.
Why Is Organic Click-Through-Rate Important?
Organic CTR is an important metric because it will help you to understand your customers. It guides you with what works the best while trying to reach your target audience.
A low click-through-rate could indicate that you are targeting the wrong audience or it may mean that you are not speaking their language persuasively enough to convince them to click.
Here Are 12 Ways to Improve Your Organic Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
To improve the CTR, you need to attract more visitors, who are likely to stick around and then convert. If you increase your CTR from 10% to 20%, your traffic will be doubled.
Here are some ways in which you can improve your organic CTR.
- Be on Google’s page #1: You need to optimize the pages that are on page #1 of Google. It is important to sort out which pages are on page #1 of Google. Without being on the first page of Google, it is quite hard to increase your CTR.
- Optimize the pages with low click-through-rates: Discover your average CTR first. You will finally get a basic idea of your highest and lowest CTR. You need to set a baseline before working on your CTR. You should start through the pages that have the lowest CTR rates. They will be easy to improve since the CTR rates are abnormally low. The flaws will be easily noticeable and can be fixed immediately.
- Search for long-tail keywords: To get clicks, it is important to grab the attention of the audience who are interested. Here comes the keyword. Before starting research on the keywords, it is very important to know how to organize them. You can organize it by dividing it into Head keywords, body keywords, and long-tail keywords.
- Make clickable meta titles with appropriate descriptions: Meta tags play an important role and form a foundation for your SERP entry. The title needs to be clickable. You need to avoid duplicate pages and also avoid plagiarism from other sites too. A good title should match the content of the page. You will use clicking users if your title does not match the content. The title should stay within a limit of 60 words.
- Make clickable meta description: make sure your meta description includes keywords to reassure that the user gets the answer on your site. Keep the meta descriptions below 160 characters to avoid any material to be cut short in your search result.
- Uncomplicated URLs: The shorter the URL the better. They are much more convenient to copy-paste and share on social media platforms. Shorter URLs are visible in the search results and can help you get more clicks.
- Rich snippets are important: Rich snippets are also known as structured data markup. They are results that have images, review scores, and product prices along with rating stars. This shows the extra information between the URL and the description of the webpage. People find it easier to click on the web pages with the added information.
- Google’s knowledge graph: Listening to your business in Google Knowledge Graph is an important factor in the CTR SEO term. Google always provides the most reliable search results to its users and the Knowledge Graph is a convenient way to provide information directly.
- Get site links: Site links make your brand more appealing as they navigate users to particular pages on your site directly.
- Addition of breadcrumbs: A breadcrumb is a small text path which is located at the top of the page. It also appears at the top of the Google search results. Breadcrumbs enable more easy and straightforward navigation to all the pages on a website, helping the users with the content that they are looking for.
- Improvement in page loading speed: searches can get frustrated with your site if your page loading speed is poor. When a page takes more time to load, users tend to exit the site. The site loading speed is vital for improving clicks and the overall experience of the users.
- Compare mobile and desktop experience: Try comparing experience with both devices with Google Console.
Final Thoughts
The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click forms your CTR. It is important to know how many people are clicking on that page and not bouncing back. There are different ways and methods that you can follow to keep your CTR stable. By improving your CTR you can boost your all-over organic search traffic and conversion rates.