Any website that features good content and provides a great experience to the users is likely to see a boost in search rankings. However, good content alone cannot ensure that the click-through rates (CTR) of the website will be high. You need to pay detailed attention to each of the following factors to increase the CTRs dramatically.
1. Title
The first thing that the users notice in search results is the title. It must be attractive and contain the keyword in it. To get ideas about great titles, you can use Buzzsumo.com, which shows you some titles which have already gone viral. Plug-in your keyword into this site and study the results to get ideas about how to create exciting titles that users will love.
2. Meta description
Meta descriptions provide details about the search results. It is considered as a major influence of CTR. This should be keyword optimized, relevant to the title and interesting. Ideally, this should not be more than 155 characters long.
3. Optimize your site URL
Site URLs should be easy to remember and easy to find in the search results. By using a well-defined and easy to remember URL structure, you can significantly increase the CTR. Also, in case any page has been moved or deleted, install appropriate URL redirects to avoid the generation of ‘404 page not found errors’.
4. Links
The internal link structure also influences the CTR. A clean link structure makes it easy for the users to navigate from one page to another. Breadcrumbs Navigation is an important technique that can make navigation easy for users as well as the search engines, by telling them how they reached the current page they are in. Activating this has a positive effect on CTR.
5. Rich snippets
Google shows rich snippets in its search results to provide a great experience to its users. Rich snippets allow Google to show extra information about a website and are very effective in attracting the users’ attention. The data highlighter Google Search Console and plug-ins like All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets Plug-In allow you to create rich snippets for your website. Internal Link Building – Best SEO Technique For Websites
6. Images
Visual information attracts the users much more than text. Thus, it is a great idea to include various images in the content to draw visitors. Nowadays, the availability of various graphic design tools like Piktochart and Canva1, make the creation of visual content a breeze, even for the non-graphic designers.
Ensure that every image that you use has a proper title, ALT tag, and caption. Heavy images are stored on your site, so use the ‘Save For the Web’ feature in Adobe Photoshop or Image Optimizer to tweak the size of the images for better optimized result.
7. Optimize the landing pages
When users click on the links on the search results, they are guided to a landing page. Pay special attention to the landing pages and ensure that they load fast, contain highly optimized images and feature a clear headline and call to action. Optimizing the landing pages will ensure that your conversion rates go up significantly.
8. Analytics
Once all the above have been done, you need to track the performance of the website. Install a good analytics tool like Google Analytics to monitor your site on a regular basis. The stats like traffic sources, bounce rates, and CTR are good indicators of your website performance. You can also use a heat map tool like ‘Crazy egg’ to visually see which parts of the pages that users are clicking on most. Use these tools to optimize your website regularly.
