When most of us think of click through rate, we immediately think of paid search traffic such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. While it is important for your site to have a good CTR throughout a paid search campaign, many sites ignore this statistic when it comes to organic search. While there is no analytics program that I am aware of that can tell you how many impressions your organic search listing has received, there is one thing to keep in mind - an organic listing is like a free advertisement for your company and you need to make sure that you are making the most of it.
Optimizing Your Page Titles
When we look at an organic listing, there are three major components and all are vital to possibly enticing a user to click on your result. The first component to your organic listing is the title. This is the clickable portion of the listing and the text that is used is extremely important in getting a user to click. Let's pause for just a second. Before I discuss how to write a good title, let’s uncover the process that has allowed a user to actually see your listing. The user types in a search and for the sake of argument, let’s say that they typed in Nike Basketball Shoes and let’s also pretend that your website sells basketball shoes and sporting equipment. In order for your site to show up for that search query, there are a variety of things that must take place but that is content for another blog post, maybe even 10 blog posts. Moving on, however, the user sees 10 possible organic listings that they can click on so how do you get yours to stand out? The title of your listing must not only contain the keyword "Nike Basketball Shoes" but it must be enticing. Perhaps you have the lowest prices - let the user know! Maybe you have the largest selection - let the user know! Maybe you carry only vintage or discontinued styles - let the user know! Being convincing while maintaining brevity is the key to writing a good web page title. Show a potential visitor what they want to see and you can drastically improve your listings CTR.
Write a Clear META Description
The second component is the description. If your site has a META description written that contains the keyword the user queried, then this description will be displayed to the user when they see your organic listing. If you have not drafted a META description, the Search Engines will pull a snippet of text from the page to use as the description. The problem with the second scenario is that a lot of times, the snippet that the Search Engines pull is out of context or does not concisely relay the message you want relayed to a potential customer. This is a chance to water the seed you have planted with your page's title. You have a little bit more room to draft an enticing message to a searcher, but it still needs to be to the point. Your description can include items such as prices, discounts, or any supplemental information you can offer depending on the products or services your site offers. Searchers generally scan this information looking for the keywords they typed in. If they find the keywords in there, especially in some enticing context, they will be more likely to click on your result.
Optimizing for the Correct URL
The last component of your listing is the destination URL. This is where the user will ultimately be taken if they click on your listing. Although this is not the most important factor of your site's organic listing, it is one that should not be ignored. Keep in mind that you can optimize any page to rank for just about any term, but does the content on that page support what you optimized for? For example, going back to our Nike Basketball Shoes query, would you be more likely to click on a link that went to www.examplesiteA.com/tennis-shoes.html or www.examplesiteB.com/nike/basketball/shoes.html? It is important that your URL's are in an easy to read format and also that they go to the best page for that term. In my example above, clicking on the first link will take you to a page that probably contains lots of shoes, tennis shoes, basketball shoes, running shoes, etc. The second example appears to obviously go to a page that contains nothing but Nike Basketball Shoes.
Watch Your Organic Traffic Grow
Although there is no way to keep track of your organic listing's click through rate, you can almost guarantee an increase in organic traffic by employing a few simple strategies to your website's titles and Meta Data. Yeah, it may seem tedious, but again, think of it as free advertising and make it the best it can possibly be.
Source: a1articles
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