How to Increase Your CTR in WordPress
You did your best to establish an online presence for your business. You’ve built a professional-looking WordPress website, implemented some of the most essential SEO practices to improve your search engine visibility, and you’ve made sure to promote your site on social media. Still, despite all these efforts, you’re not having the desired number of visits, and your website’s click-through rate is low.
Luckily, there are many different strategies you can use to optimize your website in a way that will help you increase your overall CTR. And in this article, we plan to explore some of the most effective techniques that will help you achieve just that. But first, let’s take a look at what a click-through rate actually is and how it can be beneficial for your site.
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What Is a Click-Through Rate and Why It Is Important
A click-through-rate (or CTR, for short), is a measure that represents a percentage of clicks divided by the number of impressions – or how many times people see your call to action (CTA), your page link in organic results, your PPC ad, and so on. Aside from SERPs and PPC ads, a click-through-rate is a highly important metric in email marketing as well. In that case, it shows the percentage of your total email engagement by dividing the number of people that clicked on your email by the number of emails sent.
Now, when it comes to the click-through rate of your organic search results (which is what we will focus on in this article), it’s important to mention right away that high search engine rankings don’t necessarily guarantee you more clicks. This means that you can rank as high as the first page on Google and still have a relatively low CTR.
That being said, your CTR itself can (and does) influence your search engine ranking. Even if you succeed in achieving a higher ranking and don’t earn enough clicks, sooner or later Google will take notice of this and downgrade your ranking accordingly. And vice versa – the more people click on your site, the more it indicates to search engines that your content is valuable, which can only improve your ranking and make it sustainable in the long run.
Your rankings aside, CTRs are also extremely important for the success of your business. When you think about it, this is fairly logical – if many people end up clicking on your page, you get more chances of generating more leads and, eventually, scoring more sales. And if you ask us, this is more than enough reason to invest all your efforts into improving your website’s CTR.
We’ve decided to help you out by listing some of the best tactics to earn an organic click-through rate of your WordPress site and increase the chances of people clicking your page in SERPs. It’s important to mention, however, that some other types of CTR (like your ad campaign or email CTR) will require different methods due to differences in user behavior and the influence of various parameters. That being said, most of these strategies can be used for boosting the organic CTR of any website, regardless of the platform, so make sure to read on:
Schema markup is a set of structured data created to give more information about your page to search engines. By doing so, you can increase your chances of ranking higher in SERPs. Schema is also used to display your page results in a form of a rich snippet, which serves to give more information to users and make them look more appealing than standard pages in SERPs.
Due to their ability to stand out in search results and provide additional info to both users and search engines, rich snippets are a great opportunity to boost your website’s CTR. So, make sure to add Schema markup to your site either manually (by using code), or with the help of the many available rich snippet plugins.
Meta descriptions are a crucial aspect of every well-optimized website. They are used not only to improve your SEO but can also give a significant boost to your click-through rate. After all, a meta description represents a short insight into your page or post that will most accurately describe what users can expect if they click on it. So this is your chance to score those much-desired page clicks.
Here are some of the things you should consider when optimizing your meta description:
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Think about user intent – taking user or search intent into consideration can completely change your CTR game. Simply put, if you know the reason why users are searching for a particular query, you can adjust your meta description in a way that will cater to their query in the best way possible. This way, you clearly indicate to users that your page contains that specific thing that they’re searching for.
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Include your keywords – this almost goes without saying, but keywords should be a vital element of every meta description. Apart from helping you increase your ranking position, they also let users know that your content has information about the specific terms they typed into search. Therefore, you should include your keyphrase into your meta description, but make sure to do it in the most natural way possible.
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Be mindful of the length – in general, Google prefers meta descriptions that are anywhere between 155-165 characters with spaces, so this should be your general aim when creating them. Otherwise, there’s a chance Google will take a random snippet with a similar length from your text instead, and this is not what you want.
Since your headline is displayed in search engine results pages, it is essentially the first thing users will see of your content. That’s why you should take extra care when producing your headlines, no matter what type of content they are intended for.
First and foremost, you should make sure that your headlines describe what your page or post is about in the most accurate way possible. The same goes for your meta titles, i.e. the title tags for your web page displayed in your browser tab. These tags are important as they let the users know what page they’re on. And since they’re also viewed and analyzed by search engine robots, they can help your page stand out in SERPs.
In general, all your titles should be concise while your meta title should be maximum 65 characters long, so as to prevent search engines from cutting it off and not displaying it properly. Also, your titles should be striking enough in order to attract the attention of potential visitors and get them to click and view your content. After all, if your titles are weak, regardless of your high position in SERPs, people simply won’t click on your pages.
Luckily, there are many different headline analyzer tools on the web you can use to optimize your titles and make them appear strong and engaging for users. Also, in case that you’re using WordPress as your website platform, a plugin such as Yoast SEO will allow you to preview the way your title (as well as description and URL) will look in SERPs. This is quite useful as it can help you see your site from the user’s perspective and allow you to easily spot any errors.
If you’re publishing long-form content or simply have pages that need to be organized into different sections and subsections in some way (like a FAQ page, a list of services, etc.), then adding a table of contents to your page or post is the way to go. By doing so, you can hit two birds with one stone by enhancing the user experience and helping search engines understand your page structure better. You also increase your chances of Google displaying your table of contents in search results in a form of a rich snippet, which can give you a higher click-through rate.
If you want to impact your CTR in a big way, you shouldn’t overlook the importance of your URLs. According to statistics by Backlinko, URLs that contain a keyword can increase a click-through rate by a whopping 45%. Plus, people like to see URLs that are descriptive and informative, so all these are more than enough reason to take care of the way your URLs appear to users. Your general rule of thumb should be to stick to short, but informative URLs that contain your keywords in some way.
You can create a custom URL structure on your WordPress site by going to Settings >> Permalinks (located in your WordPress admin dashboard). We recommend choosing the Post name option for your permalink. This will make your URL appear as the name of your page/post, but without the stop words. Or, you can set the name of your URLs manually, page by page (or post by post).
When a user clicks on your page, they usually expect it to load fast and perform well overall. And if this isn’t the case and your site takes ages to load, there are high chances a visitor will flee before they can even check out what you have to offer. In other words, they won’t even get to enter your page properly, which means your CTR will be directly affected. By extension, this can harm your SEO as well.
To prevent this from happening, you can use several strategies to boost your website’s speed and overall performance. For instance, you can use a good hosting provider (like Bluehost or SiteGround, for example), optimize your images for the web to make them load more quickly, you can implement caching using the help of many available caching plugins, or use a CDN service, among other things.
Last but not least, don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile. Statistics show that nowadays, more people use mobile than desktop to browse the web. And so, it simply wouldn’t make sense not to ensure that your website performs well on mobile devices.
The digital age is moving at an alarmingly fast pace, and things get out of date just as quickly. So, you want to let the users know that your posts are current and updated regularly with the latest and most relevant information from your industry. You can easily do this by including your post’s publication date, or the date when your post was last updated. This will instantly make all your posts appear more relevant in the eyes of users and increase your chances of getting more clicks.
Conclusion
A click-through rate is an important factor in a website’s success. Not only can it directly influence your ranking, but it also increases chances of getting more organic site visits and generating more leads and conversions in the long run. To step up your CTR game, we highly suggest following most, if not all tips and strategies we listed above. So, do your best to create captivating and highly-converting headlines, take care of your URLs, add appropriate Schema markup to your pages, and don’t forget to optimize the overall speed and performance of your site. By doing so, you’re bound to see some improvements.
