Struggling to ensure that people stay on your website instead of clicking away immediately? This blog gives you the best tips to optimize your page and improve your organic CTR on Google.
One of your primary goals is to ensure it ranks high in the Google search results when you have a website. However, having higher SERPs doesn’t always mean that you’ll have a high rate of people who will eventually click on your website.
Despite what you have learned in your digital marketing classes, many experts believe that CTR is crucial for ensuring better SEO rankings for your website.
Higher organic CTR helps you understand what kind of content your customers are looking for the most. For example, if your advertisement on sports shoes isn’t getting many click-throughs, it’s safe to assume that your customers aren’t interested in that product.
If you’re trying to improve your organic CTR, you have to look at various factors. Having a high rank on the search results won’t matter if you don’t have people interested in clicking on your content. Once your CTA falls, Google will immediately demote you in the search results.
“So, how can I improve my page’s organic CTR?” Don’t worry. You’ll find out soon enough.
1. Check out your current CTR
Before you move on to steps to improve your CTR, you need to better understand your website and content. If you look carefully at the Google analytics breakdown, you will figure out what draws in people to your website.
Are they looking for a particular product? How long are they spending time on a specific page?
When you analyze the particular keywords that draw people to your website, you’ll better understand what kind of content you need to focus on to improve your CTR.
2. Draw in your audience through your titles
The title of your webpage is the first thing people will see on the google search engine. Nobody likes to read bland SEO headings that provide no creativity. You can improve this by:
- Trying out different titles – Depending on your content, try to develop multiple titles that would make you want to click on the website. Avoid the obvious ones and focus on coming up with more creative headings.
- Lists are an excellent way to attract people – Everyone likes lists. You’ll see a fantastic CTR on pages that begin with “Top 10″/”Top 30” titles. But don’t go over 50 because longer lists mean reading too much, and you’ll end up discouraging people from clicking on your page.
- Use emotions in your titles – While people might not be very receptive to generic titles, they respond well to those that tug their feelings. You can take advantage of a wide range of emotions to make your titles stand out.
For example, “How can you improve your grades?” would get a lower CTR than “Don’t let low crush your hopes of attending your dream college – Improve your grades now!” which plays on the audience’s fears.
3. Use descriptive URLs
You’ll be surprised to know that descriptive URLs perform 25% better than generic ones on Google. Isn’t it amazing how you can lose so much audience because of overlooking something as simple as an URL?
Additionally, you can also improve your CTR by adding keywords to your URLs and providing categories and sub-categories in your link description. This helps the audience to know that there is more content in the broader categories they might be interested in.
4. Let everyone know what they can expect in the meta description
The meta description of your page is crucial in informing people what they can find on your page. A good meta description is short, crisp and to-the-point. No one wants to read a descriptive text when they’re searching for something urgently.
For example, let’s imagine someone wants to look for an online assignment writing service. A meta description that says something like, “Our page provides the best services where you can find professional essay writers to help you with any assignment”, will immediately attract them.
5. Improve the speed of your landing page
Let’s consider a scenario where your title managed to hook audiences and enticed them to click on your website. Seconds go by, yet your page doesn’t load. Do you think they’ll bother waiting?
Your audience will click off immediately, increasing the bounce rate on your page. Therefore, the target speed for the landing page should be less than a second if you want to ensure that you accumulate those organic CTRs.
6. Focus on driving more user engagement
Using Google Analytics, you can see what kind of content keeps your audience engaged, their average time on each page and the bounce rate. Moreover, you’ll also find crucial user demographics that can tell you about where most of your audience is from, their average age, and gender.
Using these details, you can make your posts targeting particular demographics, ensuring more organic CTRs.
7. Use infographics and visually appealing images
No one likes to read long paragraphs of text without any visual relief, such as images. Try to make the content more appealing to the audience. You can take the help of infographics, graphs, pictures and videos to keep them engaged with your content.
8. Localize your content
Over the past few years, Google has changed the way it shows search results on mobile phones. As these devices become the most common search method, you’ll notice that Google prefers to highlight localized content.
For example, suppose a student is looking for an essay helper in Arizona. In that case, you need to create your content so that it can cover both a generalized search and a specific area-related search.
9. Use sitelinks
Sometimes when you search for something on Google, you’ll find some additional links underneath the primary URLs for brands. These sitelinks help the audience jump to a relevant section of the page, making it easier to gain organic CTRs.
10. Keep your content original and straightforward
Once your audience lands on your page, you need to keep them engaged with your content. This is only possible if you keep your language simple and free of advanced technical jargon.
Do some prior research on the similar content that’s already there on the internet. Then, try to put an original spin on your content so that it sticks out from the rest.
Organic searches are always the best possible outcome that you can hope for. It gets you the traffic without you having to spend hundreds of dollars on paid marketing and advertising. When you improve your CTRs, you can guarantee better traffic to your website, leading to more successful conversions.
(About Author: Clara Smith is a freelance marketing and business analyst working for multiple companies. She hosts seminars every few months to teach young entrepreneurs about in-depth marketing tactics.)