SEO Tips: Increasing Your Click Through Rate (CTR)

Click through rate or CTR as it is referred to, acts as an important measure in understanding how well your keywords, ads and campaigns are performing. As the name suggests, its logical to want consumers to click through your website, email campaigns and ads more extensively. It shows interest and a willingness to learn more.

How do companies increase their CTR? The most successful companies and brands hire SEO specialists or have an internal team to dedicate the time, research, and implementation of these tactics. While the topic itself is detailed, we have compiled a few tasks you can do to increase your click through rate.

How to Calculate CTR

CTR is automatically populated with tools like Google Search Console, but just like every math problem you’ve encountered, understanding how it’s calculated is important for improvement.

According to Google Ads Help, “CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: click ÷ impressions = CTR. For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 5%. A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads helpful and relevant.”

What’s Considered a Good Click Through Rate

A “good” click through rate depends on factors like your industry and the platform (ads, email, website, etc.) for your campaign. WordStream compiled a list of various industries and calculated average click through rates for Google Ads. Across Google Ad’s search network, some of the industry benchmarks were:

• Auto: 4.41%
• Dating & Personals: 6.05%
• E-Commerce: 2.69%
• Education: 3.78%
• Health & Medical: 3.27%
• Legal: 2.93%
• Travel & Hospitality: 4.68%

Email campaigns tend to have a higher CTR average in our experience. Below you will find three months of data on two different companies that we run email marketing campaigns for.

Keep in mind, these are companies are in two different industries and the campaigns reflect different messaging, offers and purposes.

Ways to Increase the Click Through Rate on Your Website

On your website, you will have various web pages such as your home page, about, services or products, contact and a blog page. Each page and each blog you write, has its own content, and set of keywords to help drive consumers to your website organically. To help these consumers find your web pages, click, and spend more time on your site, consider implementing the following tactics.

Differentiate between long tail and short tail keywords

Researching keywords is crucial to dedicate time to. Keywords are great to implement throughout your website and especially important when writing blogs. Just be careful to never “keyword stuff”.

Short tail keywords often are a phrase that has three words or less and are generally quite vague. Examples include: “Italian restaurant,” “movie theatre,” or “T-shirts.” These keywords will often have high monthly search volumes which is great, but it is extremely difficult for your website to rank for these keywords consistently as there is a high level of competition. Focusing too much on short tailed keywords will not help your CTR.

Long tailed keywords are phrases that tend to have greater than three words and go into more detail. Examples include: “black shorts with Nike logo,” “how to cook bacon in the oven,” or “difference between long tail and short tail keywords in SEO.” Long tail keywords will have a lower monthly search volume, but the benefit in targeting these keywords results in driving the type of traffic you want for your site. Specific phrases provide a more exact answer to the consumer’s question and this will help drive your CTR up.

Incorporating structured data onto your website

On Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs), structured data helps to organize and present the answers that consumers seek in a more efficient manner.

We are seeing more “featured snippets” (as presented above) rising toward the top of search result pages as Google attempts to answer your question. Having your website land in a featured snippet (a.k.a. position 0) will work wonders for your SEO. Structured data can help your chances of landing a featured snippet and increase the overall “SEO friendliness” of your web pages. Google’s crawling bots are able to understand the content more easily on your pages that contain structured data.

Implementing structured data onto your website is generally accomplished using schema markup and is considered more of an advanced SEO technique. If you are unfamiliar with the topic, the best approach would be to have a web developer and SEO expert tackle the project. It requires coding skills and a proficiency with the back end of your website, but when implemented correctly, you will begin ruling Google’s SERPs.

Using the appeal of visual content

The use of visual content like pictures and videos are responsible for a large portion of conversions on the internet. William C. Bradford states that about 65% percent of the general population are visual learners.

This can surely explain the growth in social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and now TikTok. Whether or not you are learning much from social media pictures/videos, or just catching up on what friends and family post, visual content attracts our attention span in an effective fashion.

Free stock images are the easiest and most feasible option to include in blog posts and web pages. Custom images and videos work even better if you have the time and money to invest, and of course, graphic and web designers are the superior option for visual content creation.

There are many additional tasks and techniques to implement on your website in order to increase your site’s click through rate, but these are a great start!

Ways to Increase the Click Through Rate on Your Email Campaign

For some tech savvy individuals, email campaigns seem like an outdated form of marketing. Yet, for most industries, it is still a great tool to keep in contact with your customers and an efficient way to keep them updated. The problem lies in crafting an email that will encourage engagement. Consider these tips when crafting an email campaign.

Keep your email short and sweet

Create your email campaign with a goal in mind and make it easy for customers to take action. If you focus on the essentials of your message and add a button/link that is accessible without the customer having to scroll, you can capture their attention much faster.

Write effective titles and subject lines

Titles and subjects are the first piece of your campaign that will be seen. Again, think of what your goal is here (spreading awareness of a new event, featuring a certain product, etc.). You do not want to trick your audience here into opening the email so be direct on your purpose of the campaign.

Ex. from D4 Gun’s April campaign as pictured above, the first two lines customers saw were: “Check Out This Week’s Penny Auctions! Make your bid, you’ve got nothing to lose.”

The title and subject in this example are direct and incite action toward our goal.

Be consistent and organized

Keeping customers informed with news, offers, events, etc. generates excitement and is an easy form of direct communication. Creating email campaigns on a consistent basis helps to keep your company at the top of their mind.

Include visual content

Yet again, do not forgot to use visual content to your advantage. Pictures and videos do their part in attracting more attention to the campaign. Videos can be especially useful for providing more detail to supplement a lower amount of written content.

Search Engine Optimization Professionals

Achieving a higher click through rate is a lot of work. The results, however, will drive organic traffic that actually lead to conversions. Beyond your website and email campaigns, other marketing channels such as social media and paid ads heavily benefit from increasing the CTR.

With such a highly competitive market we live in today, driving the right kind of traffic to your brand is increasingly important. Mere exposure to the mass public does little for your success if you are advertising to the wrong audience.

D4 Advanced Media is a team of professional SEO specialists, marketing strategists, content writers, web designers/developers and graphic designers that can effectively drive the appropriate traffic to your brand. Increasing your CTR is only a part of our extensive skill set.

Give us a call at (775) 636-9986 for a consultation and visit our website to learn more about the professional marketing, strategy, design and development we provide for client’s in all types of industries!