Understanding Low CTR

Low Click-Through Rate (CTR) pages can offer some of the best opportunities for increasing the number of clicks to your site. If your content is ranking well, you’ve solved the first challenge of convincing Google that your content is worthy of impressions.

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The next challenge is getting users to click over to your site. Sometimes that happens naturally but other times something prevents your page from getting as much traffic as you’d expect. This article describes how to categorize, prioritize, and update your Low-CTR pages.

To find Low CTR pages in QuerySeek, navigate to the “Pages” feature and select the “Low Click Through” option.

When you find a Low CTR page that you’d like to improve, run a Google Search for the keyword in a private window on your phone or browser’s device mode. Take a look at the SERP to categorize what’s going on and then decide if there’s something you want to change.

The TLDR of this article is that if your page is appearing in the browser window but other links are more appealing, try to change your page so that it’s more competitive.

Keep reading if you want some more detail on how to categorize your Low CTR page’s relationship to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

User Intention Alignment

Sometimes your page will be ranked highly for a keyword that doesn’t quite align with what the user is looking for. This can happen with recipes and crafts where someone searches for information about a product they want to buy rather than one they want to make.

It can be possible to rewrite the content to align more closely to the user’s intention but a recipe site shouldn’t convert their homemade twinkies recipe into an article about where to buy Hostess Twinkies, even if that’s what users are searching for.

So, in cases where you think user intention is close to your content’s purpose, edit your page to be a closer match to the user intention.

When the user intention just isn’t a good match for your site’s purpose, you’ll probably want to ignore the Low CTR keyword and focus on keywords that better align with your site’s niche.

Surface Level Searching

Surface Level Search can be considered a sub-category of User Intention Alignment. There are some search terms where users aren’t really looking to click on anything or go deeper into content. Staying with the food content, I’ve seen this with super visual content like ornate cake recipes. There are very few bakers searching for “cement truck cake” in order to follow a recipe but quite a few people searching for photos of construction-related birthday cakes where the first few photos on the SERP satisfy their needs.

When you identify keywords in this category, there’s not a lot you can do to increase CTR. Maybe you can shift your content to target a different keyword, but I think the most useful thing to do is to keep it in mind while deciding on new content to write. Generally, you don’t want to spend time and money creating content that’s just going to end up as eye candy on the SERP.

SERP Features

Google has all sorts of techniques for getting users to stay within Google properties or otherwise acquire revenue instead of clicking out to your website. Among these SERP Features are Featured Snippets, AI Overviews, and Paid Advertisements. For some keywords, organic search results can unfortunately be hard to find on the SERP.

If your CTR is very low on this type of SERP, you can sometimes bump it up by improving your presentation but you should be aware that it’s an uphill battle if organic search results don’t even start showing up until the user starts scrolling.

Content Appeal

The best low-CTR pages to find are ones where the content Google is showing to users isn’t the best representation of your page’s content. This might be due to your title, images, or summary that Google displays.

If the main presentation of your page is a photo, the colors and zoom level can play a huge role in CTR. The page title can also play a huge role in helping the user decide if a search result is what they’re looking for. Sometimes the text Google uses for summary content can be perplexing but you can try rewriting sections that you don’t want presented on the SERP.

Summary

Low Click-Through Rate (CTR) pages offer opportunities to increase clicks to your site. To improve CTR, analyze the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for keywords where you’re experiencing Low CTR and categorize the page’s relationship to the SERP. Common categories include User Intention Alignment, Surface-Level Searching, SERP Features, and Content Appeal.

You’re closest to success when you find a Low CTR page with Content Appeal issues, jump on it! In the unfortunate cases where SERP Features or Surface-Level Searching are the issue, look for different keywords to focus on. For other categories, consider how you can align user intention with keywords that you’re ranking for.