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The following topics will be discussed in this post.
- Why Does CTR Matter?
- How Is CTR Calculated?
- What Affects CTR?
- How To Improve Your Click-Through-Rate?
- Conclusion
Every single business on the internet targets to improve the traffic on their website since it is responsible for bringing more direct sales to the business and creating brand awareness.
While it seems easy to shoot up your reach in the world with digital marketing, unlike traditional marketing, the digital world doesn’t rely only on word-of-mouth but on many other aspects and strategies, businesses have to apply online to grow their business.
One such factor is CTR or Click-Through-Rate which plays a vital role in bringing more traffic to your website. In this blog, we will discuss everything you need to know about CTR and ways you can improve it to build a better online presence.
Why Does CTR Matter?
Before we discuss the importance of CTR in your online business, it is important to understand what it means. CTR or Click-Through-Rate is referred to as the number of searchers who click on the organic result vs the total searches done for the term.
- CTR is majorly responsible for bringing more traffic to your website without a major improvement in the ranking of your website.
- On the other hand, Google Ads take up a major section of the SERP page, and websites have to rely on CTR to boost their online business.
How Is CTR Calculated?
A complicated method of calculating the CTR on your website is the division of the clicks on your website with the impressions created. Here, clicks are the number of people that visited your site through a certain keyword, and impressions are the number of people that searched for the keyword that results in your page.
Breaking this formula down simply points out the division of the number of people visiting your site with the number of people searching for it or the services you provide. Note that the resultant dividend is multiplied by 100.
What Affects CTR?
Till now, you must be very clear that CTR is not just a random metric meaning crackpot. It has a purpose and can easily be manipulated for benefit. To understand how to manipulate CTR to gain benefits from your website, you need to know what affects it. Here is the list of factors immensely affecting CTR:
Relevance and Searcher’s intent
When it comes to any sort of content on the internet, relevance rules the business and the market. You need to provide the type of content and information to the users that are relevant to their search.
Keywords immensely help one to stay as relevant to the searchers as possible. The information you provide needs to match the intent of the user. Provide an appropriate detail of the topic that searchers are searching for.
Device Type
As absurd as it may sound but the type of device your audience use has a major impact on your CTR. You need to identify the type of device your audience commonly use to target a certain CTR and ranking. This is because mobile users tend to scroll further down to the lower-ranked results than desktop users.
Niche
You read it right, the niche you target impacts the CTR you will get. Some niches in the digital world tend to have a higher CTR for the industry itself due to the interest and amount of audience searching for topics and services in that industry, while it can be the opposite for other niche audiences you may target.
Targeting a certain niche and understanding their search behavior will help you understand the CTR expectations you can have.
How To Improve Your Click-Through-Rate?
Now that we’ve set the groundwork for the main agenda of the topic, it is time to understand what you must do to improve your CTR. Here are a few tips you can follow if you wish to improve and increase the CTR of your website:
Use Creative Titles
Titles work as the deciding factor for the searcher on whether will he be willing to open the resulting page or not. As per statistics, generic and simple titles tend to get more bounce rates and get ignored by the audience.
On the other hand, more captivating titles have a much more tendency of getting more clicks and hence a better CTR. So the takeaway is that you should focus on giving more captivating titles will gain more CTR. There are a few tips you can follow to get better results.
- Using brackets in the titles has witnessed an increase of 40% in clicks.
- Adding numbers can give you a boost of 36%.
- Adding recent dates can give you better results as well.
Use Meta Description Smartly
Meta Description is more like a pitch you put forth to the searcher which makes it quite vital for the marketers to put a good focus on. Instead of stuffing this space with keywords, it is recommended to briefly describe the intent of the post in to grab the attention of both the SERP algorithm and the searcher.
Make Use of Snippets
Snippets on Google’s SERP are a feature that can get a website a major number of clicks. These are of two types - Featured snippets and Rich Snippets. Feature snippets are the ones that are visible on the top of the search engine results page with highlights on it.
This snippet has the highest tendency of getting more clicks. On the other hand, Rich snippets are the division of the content on the post on the SERP into smaller detailed sections which let the searcher access the post better and conveniently.
It is highly recommended to keep your focus on these snippets and get the best out of both since you can improve your CTR using both or any of the snippets
Improving the page load time
While marketers tend to focus on improving the CTR and getting the site visited for once, another major factor that is usually overlooked is retaining the searcher(s). Getting clicks may improve your CTR for once, many factors can destroy it by increasing the bounce rate.
People usually face the same problem. A common reason behind such an event occurring regularly is poor page load time. While it may sound like a total waste to you, page load time matters a great ton in improving your CTR and decreasing the bounce rate.
Therefore, it is recommended to focus your efforts on improving the page load time of your pages and website so that you can retain your audience. There are many techniques you can apply to achieve this, which include:
- Compressing the size and resolution of the images on your website. (using JPEG files is the most optimal choice)
- Reduce the number of redirects on your website.
- Avoid using unnecessary plugins on the page or website.
Conclusion
Till now, we are all aware of the importance of CTR in promoting a business online and the ways through which one can improve the CTR to get better results and grow your business online.
All the discussed methods and techniques will work well to provide you with an optimal and desired result but for a seamless and worry-free experience online, you can also consider hiring a digital marketing agency that will do the job for you while you focus on the core processes of your business.
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