Google Search Console CTR Hack

Google sign

As it’s Friday, we though that we’d share a quick tip that we’ve found very useful recently!

It’s fairly widely known that Google Search Console provides ‘performance’ data on your site’s pages which includes:

  • Clicks
  • Impressions
  • CTR
  • Average position

One great idea for getting more organic traffic, from the search presence you already have, is to work on the pages on your site which have a high number of impressions, but a low clickthrough rate. It’s a great quick win that’s simple to implement and can bring good benefits with little risk (if the page isn’t currently getting many clicks then the only way is up!)

The part of Search Console in question is the ‘performance’ tab, where pages’ needs to be selected, as below:

Search Console Performance Tab

However, if you have a Search Console export with over a thousand pages on it, for example, how are you supposed to know which pages to focus on first?

It turns out a surprisingly simple way to do this is just:

Divide impressions by click through rate and work on the pages with the highest numbers

This works better than you might expect because it takes into account how the impressions relate to the current CTR and how much potential opportunity there is. Just filtering in Excel on CTR%, low to high, may not be helpful as there will be pages with small numbers of impressions (<10 over 6 months, for example) with CTRs of say 0.2%.

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A worked example may demonstrate this better:

Page 1:

Impressions – 50

CTR – 1%

Score – 5

Page 2:

Impressions – 1000

CTR – 5%

Score – 50

Page 3:

Impressions – 800

CTR – 0.5%

Score -1600

Above, you can see that page 3 is the page that we should focus on first as it has a relatively high number of impressions. It also has a CTR that’s much lower than the other 2 pages (both of which have very high CTRs)

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