Improving your site’s search engine ranking is one way to boost your marketing and sales goals. But, if you want to drive more qualified traffic to your site, you’ll want to focus your attention on increasing your click-through rate (CTR)
What is the click-through rate?
The Click-through rate is the percentage of people who view your ad (impressions) and actually go on to click the ad (clicks).
In this article, we’ll walk you through 3 steps to improve your CTR so you can get more targeted traffic to your website and boost your sales.
1. Create compelling headlines
How you structure your titles or headlines are important to how they appear in search engine results. 8 out of 10 users will click on headlines or titles that are compelling and align with the question they are asking. We spend a lot of time creating new content, but that content isn’t worth the investment if your headlines aren’t optimized for search engines.
It’s important to take time to evaluate your current content and ensure your headlines are attractive enough to catch your customers’ attention. Remember to include high ranking and relevant keywords to maximize the results.
2. Optimize Your Meta Descriptions
Why are they important? Your meta descriptions should provide a clear and interesting explanation about your content. A good meta description will also help to support your title. The ideal length for a meta description is about 155 characters.
Meta descriptions are one of the most often overlooked fields when creating content, but a good meta description can lead to valuable results.
Like headlines, a good meta description should include keywords related to the users’ search queries so they’ll know that they have landed in the right place.
3. Improve your CTR for underperforming keywords
An underperforming keyword is any keyword where you don’t rank in positions 1 and 2 for that keyword. It means that keyword is driving little or no traffic to your website. You can use tools like Google Search Console to identify underperforming keywords and pages with low ranking and CTR to identify opportunities to further optimize them.
Here’s how to use Google Search Console to optimize your keywords
- Log in to Google Search Console;
- Go to Search results or Performance report;
- Click on Average CTR and Average positions boxes, which will add additional data points in the table;
- Set up the Positions filter to only show keywords with a ranking position of 10 or lower;
- Sort the table by Impressions in descending order, and also set it to show at least 100 keywords per page;
- Skim through the list and look for keywords that make sense, aren’t branded terms for other company names, have a reasonable number of impressions, and have a lower than average CTR.
- Use the keywords that you chose to tweak the title tags in order to get more clicks – when optimizing title tags you should be using the primary keywords you’re targeting.
There you have it, by simply following these 3 steps and identifying the right keywords for your business, we guarantee that you going to see an improvement in your CTR in just a few days.
