6 Things you can do to improve your CTR

Anyone who has got her feet wet in the waters of marketing performance measurement has heard of Click Through Rate (CTR). CTR is a calculation of how many people clicked on the links shared by you (via ads, emails, social, or web pages). This measurement affects the bottom-line because the effort, time and money spent in creating such campaigns can only be justified by the results in terms of people who clicked via that campaign and landed on your intended page.

Say, if you have created the most useful and brilliant content in the world, but if nobody clicks on it, it’s like a tree falling in the woods.

Now the thing to consider is why aren’t people clicking on your content? There could be n number of reasons behind that. Here are some of the things you should consider:

Confirm all your schema are working

You should regularly analyze your pages after pushing each code to make sure the schemas are working correctly. If you weren’t, there’s a quick way to do that through Google Search Console, where you can confirm at a glance if everything is working.

Go to search analytics, click on the drop-down you’ll see below Search Appearance and click Rich results. All of the pages with schema will show up here. Check in with every new site change to confirm nothing has changed.

                                                                                       Source: CrazyEgg

Analyze your top-performing pages

Not all pages perform the same. Some get unexpectedly high traffic while others are waiting to see someone visit them someday. To know why your low-performing pages are struggling to rank while they have created great content, compare them against your winning pages. Those that are enjoying top positions and high CTRs, can be analyzed to make the poor performers win too.

To make a fair analysis and replicate the wins, ensure you compare similar sets of pages – service pages versus service pages, blog posts versus blog posts, product pages versus product pages. This can help you turn your losers into winners and quintuple your Click Through Rate.

Create posts with images

Pictures are worth 1,000 words. It’s absolutely true when it comes to CTRs. Images are observed to be increasing engagement across all ads, emails and social media channels. You can’t accommodate 1,000 words into your search previews. However, images can do this for you. Over 90% of marketers responded to a recent survey that they use visual content for more than 50% of their content.

In general, internet users have a tendency to click on an image or a video, rather than plain text. Don’t you do that too? Include original visual images and videos in your web pages, blogs and articles as much as possible.

Crafting Compelling Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

No doubt, the era of keyword stuffing is gone. But, to make your title tags and meta-description more enticing to the user you need to optimize the tags as per relevant keywords. The prominence of including keywords might have diminished as a factor for ranking, but they can still improve your CTRs.

The meta-description and title tag tell potential visitors what to expect when they hit a link. There are 160 characters that you can use to write an effective meta-description.

Also Read: What is Click -Through Rate and Why is it important?

Use descriptive URLs

Long tail keywords are always recommended for SEO and related activities. Your URL is an opportunity for you to implement long-tail keywords. It’s one of the first things that your prospects see on your link preview – a compelling way to entice clicks.

Also, when you put up the blog posts or web pages, it’s important to properly categorize them. Here’s the optimal URL format to improve CTRs:

http://www.abcxyz.com/category-secondary-keyword1/subcategory-secondary-keyword2/primary-keyword.html

Use Powerful Call-to-Action

A Call To Action (CTA) is the entry to where you want to take your prospect to. It can be subtle or direct as you might prefer as per your marketing analysis and what has worked in the past. But the intention remains to guide your visitors to perform a desired action (such as fill a form or purchase a product). A CTA can be largely beneficial to your CTRs. According to a study, an addition of one CTA can increase clicks by 371%.

There’s no one definition of a successful CTA. The recipe of a compelling CTA includes multiple ingredients. To get started, here two tips to you can look into:

1. Large and legible text to be read easily and draw your audience’s attention.
2. Create a sense of urgency with words like “Act now” and “Download today” to drive the reader to act quickly.

To take your CTAs to the next level, try A/B testing to get a better idea of how your readers respond. This will help you improve your page linking, and thus, increase your CTR.

CTR is the holy grail of any digital marketing campaign; by improving it you improve the overall traffic and thus conversions.