How to get more clicks without ranking higher

Dan says: "CTR optimisation is something that is a norm in paid search, but people hardly do it in SEO. It's one of the single most underutilised tactics you could do. People need to dive into their search console, check out what's happening in their click-through rates, and start asking questions. Why is this click-through rate really high? Why is this one really low? And what can you do with that information? The key is in finding anomalies. Once you find one, you can do wonderful things with it."

Why have SEOs not taken advantage of this before? Is it because the data hasn't been available, or because it's been easier to just rank new keywords higher?

"It's the mindset - because it's free. If you were paying for that click, you would scrutinise the title, the description, and the competition. You would really try to squeeze every click you can get out of that ad by improving the click-through rate. Whereas, if you have an organic result, people think, 'Let's rank higher' - that's the mentality: 'If we're ranking number three, what can happen if we push it to number two or one?' However, I've seen situations where something increased in rank and lost click-through rates.

We've seen studies done by numerous bloggers and SEOs that propose what an average click-through rate is for rank one to ten. And people think this is the model they should be using to find out what an average CTR is - but the truth is a lot more complicated. There are two main reasons for this: Google's results are not just ten results anymore and the user behaviour on the search results page is not linear. We're not going from top-down slowly scanning and moving our way down. It's more like a pinball machine. Our eyes are darting around, going here, and going there. Google's not helping SEOs - they're helping the user by providing more direct answers. There are now zero-click queries, where people ask for the weather, sports results, or lyrics, and they show up on the results page.

All these special search features tend to distract users and take away from your clicks. So as part of understanding the whole process, you also need to consider whether something has a low click-through rate because of something you did, or something Google did. For example, did you write a bad meta description? Do you not have an interesting title, or is it just that Google has something shiny next to you and there's nothing you can do to improve your situation in that particular search configuration?"

What does a great title and meta description look like that will encourage a high CTR?

"So far, we've discovered a number of things. The primary thing is that people don't read online. I've done this research several times, and we found that people scan and skim pages. Just as they don't read whole articles most of the time, they do the same thing with the search results. To create an interesting snippet, you need to be brief, concise and to the point - and have some of the power words that tend to resonate with your audience. Some of those things could be titles, phrases, or questions. Some of them are a little bit 'clickbaity' and are like a trend that will fizzle out. For example, in the movie industry, you have the current trend of calls to action such as, 'watch this now' working well. This is an instructional title that tells people what to do: 'Go check this out. Stop what you're doing now and click on 'Go watch this movie'.'

You also have your whole meta description, which gives a little bit of extra information. Then you have Rich Snippets schema available, for you to add all the wonderful, extra frills to your regular snippets. Another thing that people don't always consider is SERP geometry. Let's say everyone's packing their search results and snippets with lots of content and text. If you suddenly have a very brief two-word title and a one-sentence meta description, you'll now have a lot of negative space around you - so you're standing out.

The true key to finding out the right thing to do with your snippets is to look at your data. There's no other way to see it, because one website is different to the other. There are different industries, purposes, numbers of pages, and types of pages. You could be on information pages, evergreen content, blog content, product pages, or category pages - they all behave very differently. People may have different behaviours because they'll have different intents."

Is it still necessary to have a target keyword phrase within the page title at the moment?

"This is something you need to be careful of. When optimising your snippet for better click-through rates, you have to ensure the keywords you want to rank for are in the title. That's one of the most obvious signals to Google. You still want to follow those traditional SEO rules when writing - but copywriting is super important. Also, micro copywriting, including your titles and descriptions, is super important.

I obsess over my titles and descriptions. I sometimes spend half an hour on a single snippet, writing the title and rewriting it. And then when I'm finally happy with it, I don't just trust it - I test it over a 30-day period to compare the before and after. I'm then measuring the impact of my idea to improve the click-through rate, to see if it actually makes any difference. Sometimes it's a negative, so you could inadvertently ruin your click-through rate by attempting to improve it.

There is an important thing to remember when you're testing your click-through rates. Don't compare your data on position one and position two. It has to be position one to position one and position two to position two during that period of time. Obviously, positions one and two will have different click-through rates by default because of selection bias."

What software do you use to do this, and how do you identify the time periods that have the correct positions when you can take the data to use?

"The main software I use is Google Search Console because that's really the only thing that gives you the real query data. I start with that, and I used to use Excel. I would import all the queries from Search Console into a spreadsheet, and I would use formulas to plot a CTR curve. The CTR curve gave me an average click-through rate for each position, which I could then run against the actual position and see if it deviates above or below the expectation. Because I did this all the time for all my clients, I developed my own software - which now sits on algoroo.com. You can literally do this for free - assuming you're fairly competent at spreadsheets."

If you're ranking number three with a 10% click-through rate, and position two is getting a 5% click-through rate, will Google rank you higher because of your click-through rate (if everything else is the same)?

"Google uses click-through-rate to learn and train its systems, but they have a layer of protection against real-time CTR manipulation. For example, if I just pay 100,000 people to click on something instead of something else, Google's going to find that a bit suspicious. I would say that they are using that more as a training mechanism, but they definitely use click-through rate as an algorithmic signal. Every search engine does. If you started up a brand-new search engine, CTR would be one of your primary metrics to inform you of user behaviour on the server. Now Google has Android, Chrome, and Analytics - they know what's going on. They have their finger on the pulse when it comes to web traffic, and it's a very robust set of signals that are useful for ranking.

I wouldn't worry about using CTR to change the rankings. You should be quite interested in looking at averages, to detect anomalies and attach your ROI to different rankings scenarios. The wonderful thing about working out potential traffic you can squeeze out of extra click-through-rate, is that you can also model your ranking projections based on increases in the rank itself. You can project the traffic gains on the rank-based scenario, which is separate from the CTR increase scenario.

You can do a clever little thing by importing all your Google keywords from the Ads campaigns, and all the non-ranking keywords. You can project for the things you don't rank for using your CTR model. Then finally, you can attach your average order value. For example, if you're an eCommerce website, you can attach an average order value and average conversion rate to create a rudimentary ROI study. This allows you to make projections and inform your decisions, based on how much money you will make if you achieve certain CTR or ranking scenarios."

What should an SEO stop doing to spend more time focusing on click-through rates in 2022?

"People tend to obsess over link acquisition. I've seen too many people earn links, make links, or buy links towards blog pages when in fact, the link should be going towards the product pages you want to rank for.

I'm going to circle back to branding. If you want to improve your click-through rate, you could rewrite all your titles and do clever things. However, if a web user is on the search results page and goes through the list, they will pay attention if they see a familiar brand. That is the single most overriding factor that will make them decide. If there's a whole lot of unknowns, and suddenly there's an 'Airbnb' - they're going to click on 'Airbnb' because they're familiar with it. There's a whole range of benefits when it comes to CTR.

If you weren't busy with CTR, you should definitely invest in branding, because it will improve your CTR. If you improve your brand, you'll get more traction from link building. If you reach out to somebody and they recognise your brand, they'll be more willing to interact with you."

You can find Dan Petrovic over at DEJANmarketing.com.