How To Increase Your Click-Through Rate

We’ve written about how to lower your bounce rate (worth a read if you haven’t yet).

This time, we’re covering how to increase your click-through rate, which is arguably even more important than your bounce rate. Here’s the what, why and how of it.

What is click-through rate?

Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who click a link or ad out of everyone who sees it.

CTR = clicks / impressions

For small business owners, there are two CTRs worth keeping in mind:

1. Google Ads: the percentage of people who click your ad out of everyone who sees it
2. Organic search: the percentage of people who click your page in Google’s search results out of everyone who sees it

In other words, CTR matters for both paid advertising and organic search. The higher it is, the more people reach your page or offer (and hopefully become paying customers).

How do I find my click-through rate?

In Google Ads, your CTR is shown as a column in your campaign, ad group and ad tables.

For organic search, the CTR comes from Google Search Console. Open the Performance report for search results and switch on Average CTR; the Pages and Queries tabs then show CTR for each page and search (Google’s Performance report guide). You can also link Search Console to Google Analytics 4 to see the same figures beside your other SEO metrics.

What is a “good” click-through rate?

Click-through rates vary a lot by industry and by search, so compare your CTR with businesses like yours rather than with an overall average. The chart below shows older Google Ads benchmarks from WordStream: industries such as dating, travel, advocacy and automotive tended to see higher CTRs than others.

Source: WordStream (older benchmark data)

The most useful comparison is your own CTR over time: if a page’s CTR rises after you change its title, the change worked.

How to increase click-through rate

• Edit your page’s title and meta description to make them more enticing. The title and description are what appear in Google’s search results, so you want them to grab attention and give people a reason to click. Experiment and keep tweaking until you see your CTR improve.
• Keep URLs short, clear and descriptive for new pages. (Changing an existing page’s URL needs a redirect, so don’t do it just for CTR.)
• Add structured data (also called schema markup) so Google can show rich results such as ratings, breadcrumbs or recipe details, which make your listing stand out. This guide shows how to add it on WordPress.
• Write ads and landing pages that match what people searched for, so the promise in the ad is what they find on the page.

Rock Solid Marketing is a digital marketing agency in Mildura that provides SEO services. Contact us to learn more about how to set your website up for search.