The Importance of Click Through Rates (CTRs)

What is a Click Through Rate?

A Click Through Rate or CTR is the numerical relationship between “Impressions” and “Click Through” for keywords and phrases. Any website has a CTRs for lots of different keywords and may also have a CTR for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements such as Google Adwords.

If an individual uses the internet to find someone to fix their computer, they may enter the key phrase “computer repair”. If your website appears in the listings for this keyphrase then that generates one Impression. If the user decides to click on your website then that generates one Click Through. It’s the same for PPC campaigns. Every time the advertisement is shown an Impression is generated and if the user clicks on the advert then that is one Click Through.

Click Through Rate is the number of Click Throughs compared to the number of Impressions for a particular key word/words. Taking our example in the previous paragraph, if the phrase “computer repair” is entered one thousand times in a month and your site is clicked on ten times then the CTR for your site for the aforementioned key phrase for that month is 1%.

Any website can have CTRs for a variety of keyphrases, for different periods of time or for the site as a whole. It has CTRs for organic results or for Pay-Per-Click campaigns.

Why Is Click Through Rate So Important?

Search engines use a variety of data to assess the quality of a websites content and how closely that content relates to a particular keyword/words. CTR is one of the more important factors simply because it relates directly to a particular keyword or phrase.

Lets say your website appears in position three for “it support” and it has a CTR of 1%. However, if the average CTR for that keyphrase is 3% then as time goes by you would expect those sites with a higher than average CTR to move upwards in the results whilst those with a below average CTR will move downwards. This will spell trouble for your website with it’s measly 1% CTR.

The search engines place a lot of importance on CTRs because each time an individual clicks on a websites listing in SERPs they have chosen that site over the others listed. This human interaction between the person searching and the results pages helps the search engine to improve the accuracy of its results because they are effectively being reviewed by real human beings as opposed to being based purely on mathematical information such as keyword density and prominence and calculated by a computer.

So clicks on your website listing in Bing's results for example could be considered as being votes for a particular website, for a particular keyword by a person. This is valueable information becuase of the human interaction element.

How Can Click Through Rates Be Improved?

To answer the question of how click through rates can be improved we have to consider what influences someone to click on a particular site listing or advertisement.

Taking Yahoo! as an example, the organic listings show the page title for each site along with a page description. If the page description for the page appears to be relevant to the entered words then Yahoo! will show that page description as it was entered in the meta tag. However, if part of the page content appears to be more relevant than the meta tag then that content may be displayed instead.

Generally speaking if the entered term appears in the meta tag page title and description then it will display in SERPs. If not and a section of the page text does contain some or all of the key words then a section of the page content will be displayed instead.

Improving Click Through – Is it SEO or Internet Marketing?

We now know that page titles and descriptions are displayed in search engine results. So we need to make sure these encourage the reader to click on your site listing instead of the others that appear. This then becomes a marketing exercise as apposed to SEO.

For example, if your website sells a product or service that is extremely price sensitive and you are the cheapest in the market then it makes sense to advertise that price point in your page titles and descriptions. If on the other hand your website offers specialist niche services then it is important to emphasise that fact.

Page Titles, Descriptions and Relationship With Page Content

You must ensure that they accurately reflect the content on the page. Yahoo! etc can see what your page content and headings are so if they are not relevant this will ring alarm bells and your SERPs positions may suffer as a result.

Make sure you have unique page titles for each of the pages that make up your website. Websites with identical or similar page titles throughout will struggle to gain decent SERPs positions. You can read Google’s guidelines on choosing these elements here.