After implementing SEO best practices, you have managed to get your pages ranking on the first couple pages of the search engine results page for your target keywords. Congratulations!

…but your traffic is not increasing much.

Frustrating, isn’t it? How could your pages be performing so well in the SERP and still not bring in the organic users that you worked so hard for?

The issue here is probably click-through-rate. Users are not motivated to click on your page. Don’t worry, we can fix that. 

What is CTR Optimization?

CTR optimization is the act of optimizing your appearance in the SERP to increase clicks, and therefore your organic traffic. CTR (in SEO) stands for click-through rate. This is the rate of clicks versus impressions. AKA, how many users are clicking on your hyperlink compared to how many times your link is seen in the SERP. 

There are many different factors that encourage and motivate users to click on your web page above the others. Let’s go through them and how to optimize for their improvement.

How to Improve CTR for SEO

Our team has tried and tested many different methods of improving click-through-rate organically. The following are the most successful techniques to increase CTR.

1. Utilize Google Search Console

To start, you need to identify which pages are lacking in the CTR category. To do this, make sure you have Google search Console set up for your website. This tool allows you to see the amount of impressions, clicks, and the Google search click-through-rate that each page on your site gets. 

Filter your pages by amounts of clicks, and then check to see which pages are receiving a high amount of impressions, but a low CTR.

2. Featured Snippets

The best way to skyrocket your traffic and CTR is getting a featured snippet spot within the SERP. Featured snippets are tools that Google implemented to provide users with quick, easy answers. They come in many forms and there are multiple ways you can attempt to target them.

1. Create genuinely quality content. Google is trying to pick the page that provides the user with the most accurate and informative content.

2. Ask and answer questions that users will have. You can predict this by looking at the already-existing FAQ featured snippets and answering these in your content.

3. Create numbered lists to answer the keyword’s question.

4. Look at current featured snippets or other pages ranking in that SERP. Where is there a gap in their answer to users’ questions? How can you better those questions?

5. Use images and videos in your content. We will discuss this more later.

3. Schema

Structured data, or schema, is another top tier method to improve CTR in SEO and boost the credibility of your page in the SERP. Google search implemented this tool to enable special search result features and enhancements. 

Schema not only helps your site become more recognizable in the site, but Google considers it a ranking factor.

Structured data comes in many forms, from FAQ to recipes to job posting. Below is a picture of the FAQ schema, one of the most common.

The first step to implementing schema is deciding which type you want to target. Once you’ve done that, you now need to ensure that your content is applicable to this type of schema, and that it is quality enough for Google to pick up.

This means something different for each kind of schema. For example, in FAQ Schema, you need to ensure that your page asks questions and then directly answers them within your content.

You also need to make sure that your answers to each question are quality answers, just like for featured snippets.

Next, use a schema generator in order to create the schema code and post on your page using Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or placing it directly in your site’s code.

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4. Videos/Youtube