What is CTR, how does it affect SEO and how to improve it?

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At first sight, calculate the CTR and its usefulness in Digital Marketing It is very simple. Two simple mathematical operations, a result that is easy to interpret… but their consequences for organic positioning are not always so obvious.

Let’s look at a typical scenario to better understand its scope.

After spending many hours to write your website, analyze the best keywords to position it in search engines and optimize SEO On-Page, you are finally ready to publish it.

So you publish it and spread it in the appropriate media. Before long you see that it gets a pretty good position for the keywords you had chosen and that the visits begin to accumulate.

You are happy. You were right with the analysis, the strategy, the SEO optimization… It should only be a matter of time before your page climbs more positions and receives even more visits.

But the days go by and, although your page has even been able to climb a few more positions, you notice that the visits do not go up to the same extent. At first, don’t be too alarmed. After all, SEO optimization is a long-distance race…

However, the dynamics do not change. If anything, worse. Despite being in good positions, not enough visits arrive… and you even start to lose positions in the search results!

What is happening and why?

For some reason, even though the page ranks well for the chosen keywords, it’s not attracting users, it’s not motivating them to click on your link to view it.

How can we measure and analyze this factor? And, more importantly, how can we counteract this negative trend, so that our visits continue to increase and continue to improve organic positions?

What is the CTR in Digital Marketing

It could be said that there is a parameter or a metric to measure almost anything we want to measure.

In this case, the metric that can give us indications of what is happening would be the CTR, acronym for “Click Through Rate”which could be translated as “click-through rate” or “click-through rate”.

The CTR measures the percentage of clicks that are made on a link with respect to the number of times that link is displayed (impressions). In the context of search results pages (SERPs), it would be the number of times it appears for a certain search word or words.

Mathematically, the operation could not be simpler:

CTR=number of clicks/impressions*100

The interpretation of this metric reflects the degree of interest or relevance that the link to our pages in the SERP’s has among users. The higher the CTR, the higher percentage of users have clicked on the link.

What is the CTR for?

As is logical, for different searches, on different text strings, the same web page will have different CTR values, but we should mainly focus on two:

The CTR of the keyword for which we have optimized that web page, both On-Page and Off-Page.
The CTR of any other keywords that have an “unusually” high value.

The purpose of following the first CTR is obvious: if we have optimized for that keyword, we must make sure that our strategy is working and, if not, correct it.

Among these measures could be reorienting our strategy to position for keywords that are performing better than expected and that have more possibilities than the initial keyword.

Hence, it is also necessary that we look closely at how our pages behave for other search expressions than our keywords and thus find new positioning opportunities.

Therefore, our strategy evaluation of the value of the CTR would have the following follow-up tasks:

For our keywords:

Is the CTR high? We have succeeded with our positioning strategy and we must continue along that line.
Is the CTR low? Even if we have achieved a good position in the SERPs, we must analyze why that position is not attracting more visits and take corrective measures.

For other keywords:

Is the CTR high? We must analyze why and decide if we want to optimize for that word, discarding our initial keyword (for example, in case it had a low CTR).
Is the CTR low? In principle, we should not act, unless we observe that it has an increasing trend maintained over time, to determine if we can accelerate that trend and get more out of it.

However, we should not evaluate the CTR in isolation, but together with other metrics. Interpreting it by itself can lead us to make wrong decisions; for instance:

CTR is high. Nevertheless, the bounce rate is high or the visit time is low. This user behavior indicates that they have little interest in the content of the page. If we do not solve it, this behavior will end up negatively affecting the positioning. On the other hand, we are also not interested in having many visitors who barely interact with the website.
CTR is lowbut with low bounce rate or high visit time. In this case, it means that users who visit us they like our content. However, we are not attracting enough users and we must ask ourselves what we are doing wrong that limits the number of visits.

What is the optimal value of the CTR

Until now we have been talking about “high CTR” or “low CTR” but when can you say that the CTR value is high or low?

As with almost any metric in Digital Marketing, there is no absolute value that we can use as a border to separate “the good” from the “bad”, but it depends on the interpretation of other factors and the context in which we move.

Below we will see three of the most relevant factors, which we could generalize for all SEO positioning projects:

Position in the search results page (SERP).
Market sector or niche and profile of the target audience to which it is directed.
Minimum conversion rate needs.

Position in the SERPs

Indeed, the interpretation of the CTR value is complicated due to its dependence on the position which, in the search results, occupies the link to our page.

It makes sense to assume that the links that appear in the first positions will have more likely to be clicked by users than the links displayed at the bottom of the page.

After all, as users, if we see a link in the first position, we are inclined to think that it will be more relevant or of higher quality than the one in the second position, and this one than the one in the third position, and so on.

In fact, Sistrix, developer of a powerful tool for SEO analysis, carried out a study that showed the following probabilities that a link would be clicked on based on its position on the first page of results:

As we can see in this graph, the first five positions have more than 90% more probabilities of being clicked than the next five, for the mere fact of being in that position.

However, the values in this graph refer to “probabilities”, while the CTR measures an empirical and exact (although unknown) value. Therefore, we cannot make a direct and proportional relationship between these probabilities and the CTR, but rather it shows us a trend.

Given these data, we can conclude that the CTR of a page for a specific search It will depend directly on your position on the search results page: higher the higher it is.

Market sector and user profile

On the other hand, the CTR will also be influenced by the type of content of the page or, more technically, the sector or market niche to which it is directed and the profile of the target audience.

In other words, a CTR can have a value that is considered good for a certain niche but, for another niche, that same value would be very bad. And the same would happen with the profile of our typical user.

We will understand it better through an example…

In the case of searches for luxury or high-priced products, we tend to be more thoughtful than in searches for low-priced consumer products. After all, it will mean a fairly significant financial reimbursement and we will try to make the best possible decision. With almost total certainty, we will consult several pages of luxury products before making the purchase decision.

However, we will hardly spend time looking for and comparing cheap products, but will accept almost without thinking the first link that appears. They are cheap and do not deserve much effort.

Therefore, in the first case, a priori, there will be no great differences between the CTR of correlative positionswhile, in the second case, there will be a much greater difference between one position and the next.

Conversion rate value

When we receive visitors to our pages, we are mainly interested in them completing a conversion, whatever it may be.

Actually, on many occasions the “goodness” of a given CTR value of our pages we must establish it ourselves based on other factors; among them, the conversion rate.

The conversion rate establishes the percentage of visits to a web page that convert; that is, they carry out an action that provides us with some benefit, be it a sale, a subscription, a download or a subscription, among others.

For a given conversion rate, in addition to the actions we can take to optimize it directly, the most direct way to increase the number of conversions is through increase the number of visits.

And, as we have seen, the number of organic visits goes directly through the value of the CTR of our web pages. If we manage to increase the CTR, the visits will increase and, consequently, the number of conversions (assuming the conversion rate is constant).

Therefore, given a certain conversion rate, we can calculate how many visits we need to achieve our conversion goals and, by extension, which is the…