What is a Good Click-Through-Rate for Organic Results?

How to calculate your CTR?

CTR is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. You will find this data in Webmaster Tools. Knowing your CTR in organic results is essential to evaluate your website online performance.  Bing uses CTR as a ranking factor in organic search results, and there's every reason to believe Google also does. They have never admitted it but SEO experts believe that there is a positive correlation between a high CTR and improvement on search engine rankings. According to Edmont Lau, a former member of the Google search quality team “any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking to improve the quality of search results”.

This metric can also help you to improve your conversion rate. Having a high CTR is just one step forward on your attempt to increase sales and revenue.  While a high CTR is good, it is almost meaningless if your clicks are not turning to conversions. What happen after the user clicks on the snippets? You want the viewers to spend some time on your website and move to the goal page where they should do the required action (filling out an online form, making a purchase, downloading a demo, etc.) If they leave the site straight away is because they didn’t find what they were looking for, and you will need to optimize the landing pages in order to increase the conversion rate.

What is a Good CTR for Organic Results?

Optify, a provider of marketing software and services for the Real Time Web, carried out a research to find out the average CTR for organic search results. To do so they built a database constructed from organic keyword visits from Google US for the month of December 2010. They analyzed 250 sites, 10,000 keywords and 1.2 million clicks. According to the study, the top 3 sites on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) get 60% of the clicks. The first results should get about 36.4% of the clicks. The average CTR for the first page is around 8.9% while the average CTR for the second page is 1.5%. These results show why is so important to move the target keywords to the first page and then to the top one. The study also concluded that ranking first on the second page is slightly better than ranking 10 on the first page.

Some experts might think that the study is not 100% scientific. However, it provides us an overview to understand what to expect from your SEO strategy. If your site is on the first page of Google but you are not getting the expected number of click, your snippets are probable not appropriate.

Improve your CTR

Controlling SERP is a challenging job because, in some cases, search engines chance the snippets to make them more appropriate to the given query. However, it is advisable to improve all the elements that can contribute to increase CTR of organic results:

•    Make your page title stand out. The title is one of the most important factors for a successful search engine optimization of your website and is a key factor to increase the CTR in organics results.  Ensure that each page has a unique meta-title, always include your target keywords and emphasize the quality of the product or service.

•    Optimize your meta-description. This tag will appear in the text of the listing of most (not all) search engines when Internet users do a search. Use interesting words because this is what your reader will see. An engaging, call to action meta-description will convince the viewers to visit your site.

•    Create pages to target specific keywords search. If you use common keywords across multiple pages the site will compete with itself for rankings and dilutes the ranking power of internal anchor text, external links and keyword relevancy.

•    Use your Adwords ads. If you are running (or have run) an Adword campaign, pick up the most successful ads, in terms of CTR and conversion rates, and use them as meta-descriptions.

•    Include relevant sitelinks and rich snippets. Websmaster Tools provide the tools to create rich snippets and modify sitelinks.

•    Write reviews. Google Maps you can add reviews to your business. A site with a high number of positive reviews is more attractive to the viewers.

•    Use +1 action. Social metrics are already well correlated with good rankings.  Using +1 Google allows you to endorse URLs. e Google +1 is still in a bright new and experimental stage but Google has established that social recommendations with the +1 button could be used to influence search results, since they improve the relevancy of a result.