Get More Traffic With Google Search Console (CTR Optimisation)

Usually, getting more traffic involves the hard work of generating new traffic from fresh sources-whether that be from content marketing, paid advertising, putting the legwork in on social media, and so on.

However, there is another way! By leveraging Google’s Search Console data, we can look to get more traffic from existing organic listings, simply by optimising how they display in search results. This isn’t something that we’ve often seen talked about, which is a shame, because you may well be getting large amounts of potential traffic due to good rankings, but if your target audience isn’t engaging well with your search listings then you may be missing out on additional visits. So, without further ado let’s jump right in!

To make this concept work for us, we’ll be using the following process:

1. Going to the ‘performance’ tab of search console as below:

1. Setting the daterange to give a decent sample size, usually 3-6 months.
2. Enabling the clicks, impressions and CTR fields (average position isn’t always useful as it’s based on a mean average over the period, so may fluctuate quite a lot and not give the whole picture)
3. We then want to go to the ‘pages’ section (queries is useful, but doesn’t really tell us what parts of our site we can optimise) and click on the download button:

Once our CSV has downloaded, we can then start filtering our pages. We would generally recommend filtering to the following to narrow down pages that are good candidates to optimise:

• Over 500 impressions (depending on the date range set, less is fine if a shorter time period is used)
• Clickthrough rate of less than 1.5% (this will vary by industry, search query and many other variables, but certainly anything under 1% needs work)
• We could also do a simple A-Z filter to establish if any particular groups of subdirectories or URLs are having problems; it may also be the case that pages are identified here that are getting a lot of search traffic but shouldn’t be (user-only parts of the site for example) although we’ll go into this in a later post, identifying such pages and dealing with their search visibility can help greatly in dealing with index bloat problems.

We can then start working through a checklist of items to optimise on these pages to get more clicks for them in organic search:

1. Page title-is it too short? Too long and getting cut off? Has it potentially been generated automatically and lacks appeal? You could also take the opportunity to edit the keywords and keyword order slightly.
2. Metadescriptions-do they describe the page accurately and contain strong CTAs and USPs for either the product/service, the company, or both if appropriate? For E-commerce stores, it’s fairly common that the product description doubles as the metadescription, which will mean that
3. Structured data-are there any potential data points on the page (s) that could be marked up? If this has the potential to generate rich snippets for the page, it may benefit from a better CTR. For example-review stars or breadcrumb markup.

As an example, let’s compare the following two imaginary SERP entries:

We’ve deliberately exaggerated the simplicity of the first one; it’s fair to assume that the second entry would have a better clickthrough rate than the first one-in the above, we’re using specific details of what was achieved along with a number to grab the searcher’s attention, as well as being more specific with both the title and URL. Doing so gives the searcher in this example a good reason to choose to click on the result, as tangible benefits are visible.

For E-commerce, we may have to work with company-specific USPs, particularly when competing with other retailers who may well be selling the same products. Free delivery and/or short delivery times, cutting-edge pricing, or click and collect being available are all potential additions to E-commerce metadata.

As a general rule in E-commerce the main category and subcategory pages should have their own, non-templated metadata, and priority products should have unique and optimised metadata as well.

If we work on the assumption that a searcher is looking for a reason to click on a search result, it makes sense to treat our search results as though they’re a digital shop window-by arranging the displays carefully, we can capture more of that passing traffic who might otherwise just be window shopping!