Click-through rate is the percentage of users who click on your website when presented with the option though an advertisement or other method. In SEO, we usually measure “organic” click-through rates which is the percentage of users who click on a website when it is shown to them in a search engine results page (SERP).
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How is CTR calculated?
Click-through rate is simply the number of users who clicked on your website divided by the number of users who saw your website in a results page. For example, if your website was seen by 100 people and 10 of them clicked on it, you would have a click-through rate of 10%.
What is a good click-through rate (CTR)?
What a good click-through rate looks like depends on a number of factors including the industry the business is in and the search term used. In general however, the average CTR for the first organic result is around 40%. This number drops to 18% for the second result and 10% for the third. If your numbers differ significantly, it may be a sign you’re doing something wrong (or right!) with your website’s meta data.
How can I measure click-through rate CTR for my organic search listings?
The best way to measure your CTR is with Google Search Console. It can take up to a day for the data to be compiled once Search Console is set up, but then you can go to the “Performance” section and easily see your CTR for top keywords.
How can I improve my CTR?
There are a number of ways to increase your CTR. Firstly, you should optimise the data that appears in search snippets for high ranking pages. Page titles should be unique, accurately describe the page, and be kept to under 60 characters. Meta descriptions should also be unique and descriptive, and be limited to 160 characters (so it is not cut off). URLs should be kept short with a clear file structure and (hopefully) a relevant domain name.
Once your metadata is optimised, you can use schema markup (LINK) to make your page eligible to appear as a larger “rich snippet” in search pages. Rich snippets have been demonstrated to increase click-through rate when presented to users.
Does a high CTR guarantee a higher search engine ranking?
In general, a higher click-through rate will lead to higher ranking. Like all ranking factors, the exact relationship between CTR and ranking is kept secret by Google, but it is generally considered to be very important. Google themselves has confirmed that they use CTR to examine the quality of search results.
There is also some indication that user behaviour such as CTR becomes increasingly important the higher a page ranks.
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