Everyone knows that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important. And many believe that the only way to get potential customers to click on their listing is via paid advertising. While this certainly can improve the ranking on search results pages, there are things you can do to improve your chances of being clicked.
While SEO is ever-changing, it is worthwhile taking a look at recent history to understand what’s happening. Brian Dean from Backlinko recently released a the results of a major study undertaken with data from ClickFlow.
They analysed 5 million Google search results to get a detailed view of organic click through rates (CRT). Firstly, they analysed CTR data across 800,000 + pages and 5 million + search queries. They followed this up with a discovery of how factors such as the length of title tags and meta descriptions affect organic CTR performance.of being
Here is their Summary of Key Findings:
1. The #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7%.
2. The #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in #10 spot.
3. Organic CTR for positions 7-10 is virtually the same. Therefore moving up a few spots on the bottom of the first page may not result in more organic traffic.
4. On average, moving up 1 spot in the search results will increase CTR by 30.8%. However, this depends on where you’re moving from and to. Moving from position #3 to position #2 will usually result in a significant CTR boost. However, moving from #10 #9 doesn’t make a statistically significant difference.
5. Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR vs. pages that don’t have a question in their title.
6. Title tags between 15 to 40 characters have the highest CTR. According to our data, pages with a title tag length between 15 and 40 characters have an 8.6% higher CTR compared to those that are outside of that range.
7. URLs that contain a keyword have a 45% higher click through rate compared to URLs that don’t contain a keyword.
8. Adding “Power Words” to your title tag may decrease your CTR. We found that titles with Power Words had a 13.9% lower CTR compared to titles that didn’t contain Power Words.
9. Emotional titles may improve your CTR. We found that titles with positive or negative sentiment improved CTR by approximately 7%.
10. Writing meta descriptions for your pages may result in a higher CTR. Pages with a meta description get 5.8% more clicks than those without a description.
We recommend you take a close look at Brian’s full blog post to dig deeper into the results. Even if you try just a couple of things from the report you might get an improved click-through rate.
