Close the knowledge gap

The biggest reason that people even head to search engines in the first place is to fill the knowledge gap and receive an answer to their question. However you may be thinking that this isn’t always the case as some of us are there to look for e.g. memes. Although that may be true, people aren’t necessarily looking for memes, they are looking to find out where they may find memes.

The fact is that when people search for things they are looking for a website or a person that can help them solve the mystery that is on their mind. These are referred to as ‘search queries‘.

There’s a lot of resources

Luckily for us there is plenty to go around in terms of answering, solutions and tips to our queries. Normally we are presented with roughly one million results in the space of a half a second that are all ready to help us in our search for answers. We have the option to sample the content and see what’s around and we can most definitely agree that pages that look good definitely captivate our attention much longer than those that don’t – it’s almost like an audition.

Sadly for some of us we don’t get a chance to show our capability and who we actually are. This is why all businesses battle to make it to the first page of Google as users won’t go through every single search result. If you are looking at increasing the amount of traffic entering your website then you will need to look into improving your CTR.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

Click through rates are the amount of clicks that your websites receives divided by how many times your website has appeared for that specific search term.

Number of Clicks e.g. 120 / Number of Views e.g. 1000 = 0.12
This means that your CTR is 12% which isn’t actually that bad but when compared against those that rank at the top of Google it may not be as good as it seems…

However, this is looking at organic searches specifically without the help of Google ads or any other form of promotion. The main question we want to know is what is considered a good CTR? Just for comparison the top organic search has an average CTR of 31.7% and they are 10x more likely to receive a click compared to the tenth search result (Backlinko 2019). CTRs are beneficial as they bring more visitors, correlate to higher conversion rates and they improve your Google ranking. Just improving your CTR by 3% can move your position up by one.

How to improve your CTR:

#1 Use questions in your title tags
Titles tags that contain a question will increase their CTR by 14.1% higher compared to pages that do not feature one (Nettl). This matches the theory of users going on Google to find answers and by using a question in your title tags you are giving the impression of having an answer present in your blog or article.

#2 Use of keywords
Ensure that you are using specific and targeted keywords in your titles and descriptions as that is reassuring for users when reading a snippet of your article or blog that it answers their question or concern. Top tip! Try keeping it natural and not being too keyword heavy.

#3 Calls to Action (CTA)
You want to make your users experience (UX) worthwhile and enjoyable meaning that you should be using plenty of CTAs across your page which will help guide the users to where they need to go to find their information. This is also an opportunity to keep users a little longer on your website and direct them to maybe an about page or contact page to encourage them to speak or interact with you.

#4 Descriptive URLs
Using URLs that tell users what the content is about improves your CTR by as much as 25% (Nettl). This is a very quick and easy way to really boost your CTR if it isn’t something that you are doing already. I’m sure you may have come across a website before that features a lot of random numbers and letter rather than describing what the page actually is.