8 Ways to Increase Your CTR in WordPress
Your website is an essential business asset. And that’s especially true when marketing and lead generation are concerned.
But for it to do the heavy work of generating leads for you, it must be optimized for visibility. More than that, your WordPress site must be optimized to drive clicks.
And that’s why you must know how to increase your CTR in WordPress.
What is CTR (And Why Does it Matter)?
Before we delve into looking at the strategies you can use to increase the CTR of your WordPress site, let’s briefly look at what CTR is and why it matters.
What is CTR?
Click-through rate, abbreviated to CTR, refers to the percentage of searchers that click on a search result on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Once your website or web page is ranking well, the next challenge is to increase the CTR. After all, if people don’t click-through, your site will lose out on valuable visitors.
The Importance of Increasing Your CTR
Why is CTR important to the success of your WordPress website?
Let me give you a couple of reasons why:
- Helps increase your rankings. One of the factors search engines use to rank websites is the number of visitors to a page. The more people click-through to your website, the more search engines deem it valuable. As a result, they rank it higher.
- High CTRs are good for business. The more people click through to your website, the higher the chances of you generating more leads and, ultimately, building a bigger customer base.
So yes, your CTR is important. And you need to do everything in your power to increase it – especially if you want to make money with WordPress.
How to Increase Your CTR in WordPress with 8 Simple Tweaks
Fortunately, increasing your CTR in WordPress isn’t rocket science. You just have to follow a few best practices, and you’ll be well on your way to high CTRs – even if you’re just starting your blog.
1. Evaluate Your Current CTRs
Before you go tweaking your website in the name of increasing your CTR, the very first thing you must do is consider your current CTRs. You can easily do this by using Google Search Console or any other web analytics tool like Monster Insights.
How do you do that?
First, go to the Search Analytics tab and filter your results by CTR.
Look for pages that rank high but have low CTRs.
Despite ranking high, these pages don’t get as many clicks as they should, and you must figure out why. The reason could be anything from a poorly written meta description to a headline that doesn’t match search intent. But more on that later. It is also important to note that CTRs can be affected by niche so it is important to understand the intent of the searcher.
With that being said, let’s move and see how you can improve the CTRs for these pages.
2. Optimize Your Headlines and Title Tags
One of the first things users see when they land on SERPs is the title tag. This is the headline displayed on SERPs and can be exactly like the main headline in your post or an optimized derivation.
To increase your CTR in WordPress, you must craft highly clickable headlines and title tags. Here are a few tips on how you can do that:
- Watch the length. If your title is too long, some words may get truncated, leading to it losing its meaning and impact. Keep your titles under 65 characters.
- Frontload your keyword. Put your main keyword as close to the beginning of your title as possible. This will help readers immediately see that your page is relevant to what they’re searching for.
- Use power words. These are words that elicit an emotional response from readers. The emotional connection encourages searchers to click-through to your page.
- Test to find what works. Use A/B split testing tools to measure the performance of one page against another. This will help you see what content performs best.
To increase your CTR in WordPress, your first port of call must always be your titles. If your titles are weak, people will simply scroll past your page to click on those with a greater appeal.
3. Pay Attention to Your Meta Descriptions
Next to your headline, the other important element you must work on to improve your CTR in WordPress is your meta description.
One thing you should never do with your meta descriptions is to leave them set to default. Search engines will just pull the first 155-165 characters in your post and use that as the description. In most cases, this won’t make sense to searchers. Instead, create custom meta descriptions that elicit clicks. Here’s how:
- Use your keywords. Again, your keywords and secondary keywords play an essential role here. When people see their search term in your meta description, they’re more likely to click-through.
- Leverage user intent. Knowing why your target audience is searching for your particular page will help you craft meta descriptions that appeal to them.
- Use active voice. Meta descriptions that drive clicks are written in active voice. This is because it inspires action.
- Include a call to action. While its main job is to describe the contents of the page, a well-crafted meta description must also have a call-to-action.
Your meta description is a mini sales pitch. Use it to convince users why they should click on your link.
4. Use Descriptive URLs
A mistake many people make that causes their CTRs to tank is to neglect to optimize their URLs. Fortunately, WordPress makes it easy for you to create custom URLs, also called permalinks, by changing their structure.
How do you create descriptive URLs?
First, go to your WordPress dashboard, then settings. Click on “Permalinks”.
Set your permalink settings to “Post name”, where your URL will be the name of the post (minus the stop words). Alternatively, set it to “Custom structure” where you can manually write the URL of each page.
So what makes for a clickable URL?
- Short
- Descriptive
- Contains the keyword
With research showing that descriptive URLs can increase CTRs, this is something you just can’t ignore.
5. Include Publish Dates
Want to increase your CTR in WordPress?
Of course, you do.
One way of doing that is to include publication dates on your posts. The world is changing at a breakneck pace, and information can quickly get outdated. That’s why adding publish dates to your posts will do your CTR a lot of good.
When people see that your post is current, they’ll prefer it over those with old dates. They‘ll even pick it over posts without dates.
One thing you must be careful to do regularly is to update your old posts. Not only does this please the search engines, but it also helps give your posts a more recent publication date.
6. Set Up Structured Data for Rich Snippets
Structured data (schema markup) is a format of organizing data on a web page and communicating it in a simple to understand way. Because search engines understand structured data better, they rank such content higher.
But more than rankings, structured data is used by search engines to create rich snippets that give users more information about your post.
Rich snippets have been known to help increase CTRs by as much as 30%. The main reasons for this are that they’re:
- Interactive in nature. People love interactive content, and rich snippets are a great way to satiate that need.
- Provide extra information. This helps users decide whether to click your link or not.
- Attention-grabbing. Rich snippets are attention grabbers as they stand out from other bland results on the search results page.
How can you implement rich snippets to increase your CTR in WordPress?
I’ll give you the simple way for WordPress websites – use a schema markup plugin.
You could do it the manual way, but that will involve a bit of tinkering with code.
7. Improve Your Website’s Performance
Yes, your website’s performance does have a bearing on your click-through rate. That’s because CTR means a visitor actually lands on your website. And if your website performs poorly, especially in the speed department, users will click away before they land on your page.
Not only will this hurt your CTR, but it will also hurt your SEO and, ultimately, your bottom line.
A few ways to improve the performance of your website include:
- Choose good WordPress hosting
- Install a CDN
- Implement server caching
So, make sure to check your website’s performance and improve where needed. Your CTR depends on it.
8. Optimize for Mobile
It’s no secret – people are using their mobile devices more than desktops to search the internet.
And forecasts show that mobile devices will only continue to become more popular than their desktop counterparts and by 2025, 72% of web browsers will only consume content on mobile devices. That’s why you must optimize for mobile if you’re to increase your CTR in WordPress.
One way to optimize for mobile is to set up accelerated mobile pages (AMP) for your website. These are lightweight pages that load super fast. And yes, this does have a bearing on your CTR, as Teads proved it with a 200% increase in CTR after implementing AMP.
Adding AMP to WordPress is easy thanks to a number of quality free plugins. The Official AMP plugin or AMP for WP are both great options to quickly add and enable AMP on your website.
Increasing Your CTR in WordPress – Your Success Depends on It
Increasing your CTR in WordPress is not an option considering the hyper-competitive nature of the internet. With so much great content out there, the battle to get views on your pages doesn’t just end with SEO. Once your pages rank, you must also consider optimizing them for click-throughs.
That’s why you must map out a strategy to increase your CTR in WordPress. After all, your success depends on it.
Very much informative post especially newbie like me will know many things from this post.
Thank you very much, Wesley, for sharing the post with us.