You’ve done it. You’ve managed to rank on Google’s top 10 results for your targeted keywords. Your hard work has finally paid off. But there’s a problem — only a very small amount of searchers are clicking on your article.
High Google impressions and low clicks might be a nice problem to have, but you need to increase those clicks, or Google will remove you from the top ten.
What are Google impressions
Firstly, Google impressions are when people search on Google for a query and they land on a results page you’re ranking in. One of the ways that you can find this is through Google Analytics→ Acquisition→ Search console→ Landing pages.
Acquisition is in the left side of the screen:
What’s a good clickthrough (CTR) rate
CTR is the rate at which the searchers click on your result after looking at it. On average, the first result on Google has a CTR of 31.7%, and in general the 1st result gets clicked 10x more than the 10th result, and positions 7-10 roughly have the same organic CTR.
Below is a breakdown of the average CTR based on search position.
As you can see, being in the first 10 results is not enough — unless the query gets thousands of monthly SEO visits. You need to be in the top 5 results in order to get a CTR of above 10%.
Even the first result is not capturing 100% of the clicks, and this is something that you need to take into account when doing your SEO strategy. Getting +10k search visits becomes especially impressive when you’re able to do this in a very saturated space, like marketing.
But anyway, what if you’re achieving a CTR that’s below average? Well, here are some tips to increase your CTR
Include the targeted keyword on your title
In general, titles that include the keyword have on average a whopping 45% higher CTR than those that do not. And in any case, you’re trying to target this keyword using this content, so the title kind of needs to reference it in some way.
Your titles should have between 14-45 characters
Your title length should ideally sit between 15-45 characters, as titles within this range get 8.6% more clicks than those that do not.
Turn your title into a question
Questions get 14.1% more clicks than those that are not. Someone actually did an academic study on this:
Improve your meta description
While this does not directly influence your ranking, think of it as a call-to-action to entice the search into clicking on your content. So make sure that your metadata is well-written and is persuasive enough to garner clicks.
Include schema markup
Schema markup describes what your content data is to Google. This helps them make your search results become more interactive.
Schema markup makes your search result look more beautiful. It adds stars if you’re a reviewer, includes your recipe, if you’re a cooking blog, and even adds your table of contents on the search results!
But only ⅓ of websites use schema markup. Implementing this can seriously give you an SEO boost by differentiating your search result from the rest, which will hopefully lead to more clicks.
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