Maybe all this time you have been wondering, why is your website only visited by a few users even though you have provided quality and interesting content. Unfortunately articles from your website only perch on the second page of search engines. However, have you considered a number of things regarding the Click Through Rate (CTR) on your website pages? Have you taken the time to optimize it?
If Erzedka Friends starts to get confused, don't worry! In this article, we will discuss in full what Click Through Rate is and how to increase it. Come on, see below!
What is Click Through Rate (CTR)?
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CTR is the ratio of users who click on an organic result on a search engine results page divided by the total number of impressions. Clicks come from organic search results, while impressions are the number of website pages that appear in search engines.
According to Google, click-through rate or CTR is the number of visitors who click on the ad that you place on a site.
According to Adjust, CTR is useful for analyzing the ratio between the number of viewers who see an ad and how many view it.
If the display impression is high enough, but the clicks are few, it could mean that something is not optimal from the way you advertise. To calculate CTR, you can use the following formula:
- Impressions: the number of ads served
- Clicks: the number of ads clicked
For example, you advertise on AdWords. During installation, the ad has received 1,000 views. However, out of 1,000 visitors who saw the ad, only 200 people were interested in clicking on it. Then the CTR is 20%.
How to Calculate Click-Through Rate
How to calculate the Click Through Rate is the total number of clicks divided by the total searches. For example, the impression of your website page for the keyword "How to Make WordPress" is 1000, while the number of clicks is 150, then the CTR you get is 15 percent.
CTR = 150 : 1000 x 100 = 15%.
The higher the CTR percentage obtained, of course, the better.
Why is Organic CTR Important?
Optimizing the organic performance of a website's CTR is very important, several reasons include:
- More and more users are viewing, opening, and engaging with the content presented, both on email marketing and social media.
- CTR can bring more traffic for a website without increasing the ranking of the website itself.
- The conversion rate will increase as the click through rate increases.
- CTR can be used to measure the success of pay-per-click (PPC), call to action (CTA) from a landing page, to blog uploads and email campaigns.
What are the Ways to Increase CTR?
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Here are some ways to increase website click through rates organically, including:
1. Use Long Tail Keywords
Keywords are an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By finding and using the right long tail keywords on the website, of course this will increase the volume of organic traffic.
For example, when a customer searches for “best laptops under five million rupiah” or “black metal bracelet” they are much more likely to buy than when they search for “laptop” or “bracelet”. If you are a product manufacturer, you will get a higher quality CTR with long tail keywords.
There are many ways to find long tail keywords that are suitable for what you need. You can use several keyword researchers such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Search Console, or other keyword plugins.
2. Writing Creative Headlines
The title tag is an HTML tag that is in the main body of every web page. Titles provide initial clues or context about the topic of the linked page. This is important because if you want visitors to click on your website pages, they won't see much other than the title in the SERP.
Don't forget to also insert the target keywords you want in the title, so that you increase the chances for the page to rise in the top search engine rankings. There are several effective ways to write titles, including:
- Avoid heavy title tags — Not only are these boring and don't generate many clicks, they will also result in crawling by search engine bots.
- Utilizing parentheses in titles — Reporting from Search Engine Journal, a study by HubSpot found that parentheses in titles increase clicks by 40%
- Create numbered lists — Reporting from the Search Engine Journal, research by Conductor found that a number in a title increases CTR by 36%.
- Always test the title you use — Feel free to change the title frequently until you find one that is just right.
3. Write an Effective Meta Description
The description meta tag contains most SERP (Search Engine Result Page) entries. Through a brief explanation of the meta description, visitors will know whether when they click on the link they will get answers to their questions. Here's an example of how the title and description tags look for the official Erzedka page.
Writing effective descriptions can increase click through rates. Take advantage of 160 characters to write short, clear, and to the point meta descriptions. Without this description, search engines will display sentences around keywords to provide context for the content of website pages.
You can also control what search engines show for page previews by using a WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math. Here is an example of the preview snippet displayed by the Rank Math plugin before uploading an article:
Here are some techniques for writing good meta descriptions:
- Provide Answers To Questions — The reason why users come to search engines is to look for answers to their questions. If you can answer these questions in the description, here you can already attract the hearts of users to get quality click through rates.
- Make it Specific and Relevant — When writing a meta description, make sure it is relevant and specific to the keywords the user is typing into the search engine. Also make sure the writing is natural and solves the problem the user is looking for the answer to.
4. Use Descriptive URLs
There have been many studies to SEO Experts who say that descriptive URLs are important and related to the level of click through rate received. Visitors tend to prefer to click on URLs like erzedka.com/blog/what-is-ctr/ rather than erzedka.com/blog/ctr=seo/12345?.
Make sure you optimize the URL when creating new pages, and if necessary change the URL of the website completely, of course in an SEO friendly way.
5. Adding and Optimizing Images
In fact, adding interesting and contextual images can increase engagement, especially on social media. Images play an important role as they can add to the attractiveness of website visitors.
Using relevant images, graphics, screenshots or videos on a page can provide additional information about the topic you are writing about. Not only will this improve CTR quality, but it will also make the reading experience easier and more enjoyable.
Just imagine if the web pages were only filled with writing, wouldn't that be very monotonous? It is clear that visitors immediately leave the site and this actually triggers an increase in the bounce rate which is not good for the website.
But adding relevant images is not enough, you also have to optimize them. When images are well optimized, traffic will increase. In order to properly optimize images, you need to understand the three elements that accompany images on a website:
- Image Alt Text — The image alt text on an image describes what the image is about, both for search engines and users. Without this text, search engines cannot know that the images on the page are objects or people. Alt text tells search engines what images are and how relevant they are to the content on the page. So it's the website owner's job to help search engine bots understand the images used by using alt text.
- Image Title — The title on the image provides additional information about the image. Ideally, you should use one description for the title tag and another for the alt text. Writing an image title is the same as writing a content title, that is, make sure it is concise, clear, contains less than fifty characters and is relevant to the image.
- Image Caption — This image caption is a description of the image in text form. If you are using a licensed image, you can use this text to credit the source or owner. For example, when you take an image from Pixabay.com, provide a reference via the caption.
If you are a WordPress user, after uploading an image you can add the three elements above in this section. But it's important to remember, pages with lots of large images will load slowly so you'll need to compress those images first. You can use Imageoptimizer.net to make images load faster for the web.
6. Take advantage of PPC Ads
This method is the most underused to immediately increase CTR, namely by utilizing pay per click (PPC). Identify keywords that have low CTR but your website ranks high enough and create paid search ads for them.
Not only will this increase the likelihood of a user visiting your website, but you can also quickly test different titles and descriptions to identify content or topics that visitors are interested in. This can be your reference in making listing articles that are liked by search engines.
7. Content Structure in Featured Snippets
Snippets are search results that appear as content boxes on search engine results pages (SERPs). Generally, the contact contains a summary of information that attempts to provide an answer related to the user's query.
Featured snippets are usually placed at the top of the SERPs and below paid ads and above other organic search results. A study by HubSpot found that CTR for their high-volume keywords increased by more than 114 percent when their search results appeared as featured snippets.
There are several types of featured snippets, including:
- Paragraph Featured Snippet: As the name implies, this type of snippet provides snippets of text designed to provide users with a direct and concise definition or description. These snippets are also commonly used by search engines to answer "What is" queries.
- Numbered List Featured Snippet: This snippet presents a list of items in a specific order. Search engines tend to use the numbered list featured snippet for queries that require a series of steps or a total number of content that answers a user's question.
- Bulleted List Featured Snippet: Listicle articles are created for this type of snippet, whether it's content you create to rank items or simply listing them. Bulleted list featured snippets tend to appear for content related to best lists, rated items, unrated items, or featured lists.
So how do you get your search results to appear in featured snippets? Search engines like Google usually choose a page that does answer questions from visitors. So if you want to start optimizing it, try to research your main keywords in the SERP and see what featured snippets appear. If so, it's important for you to structure content similar to how the featured snippet displays the answer...
For example, if the featured snippet displays list-based, you need to create content that also has a numbered list format. This will increase the chances of the content appearing in the featured snippet.
8. Increase Page Load Time
While this may not seem like a great way to increase your organic click through rate, making sure your site loads fast can be a big factor, you know! Because, clicks only count if the visitor actually opens your website.
If page load times are slow, clicks may be difficult to occur. Some tools to check website speed level are GTMetrix, Uptrends, Dotcom-monitor, Sucuri, and Sematext.
Conclusion
Organic traffic is one of the keys to ranking your page on search engines. The only way to get this traffic is to get clicks from Google and other Search Engines. By increasing your click through rate, you can optimize your overall organic traffic and conversions.
From the discussion above, it can be concluded that click through rate (CTR) is the percentage ratio between the number of clicks on your site pages and impressions. You can calculate your CTR by dividing the total number of clicks by the number of impressions.
Meanwhile, calculating organic CTR can help you estimate organic traffic coming to your site. If your CTR is low, then you should fix it by increasing the CTR as explained above.
Apart from increasing CTR with the tips above, you can also increase CTR by optimizing your marketing strategy. One of them is by using the best omnichannel application.