Any tips on increasing CTR on search engines?
Greetings WAers. I need some tips from the WA community today.
I've been checking my blog's Webmaster Tools account and I'm seeing the CTR (click through rate) is very low.
The average for the whole site is around 1%.
Now I'm thinking about changing some titles but I'm not sure how that will affect the rankings.
I remember there was a lot of fuss back in the day here at WA advising us to not change our titles once the post has been ranked cause that will lead to it being de-ranked.
The other option I have in mind is to create a whole new post (on the same topic) with a more attractive headline and see how that plays out in the SEs.
Any tips on the subject please guys? Or maybe you can direct me to a training here at WA or elsewhere ?
Many thanks. I appreciate your help.
Chris Lee
Recent Comments
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You don't want to change the titles however, you could rewrite the meta descriptions and see if your CTR improves.
I don't really write meta description anymore.
Kyle himself told me it's basically useless nowadays to write meta descriptions while Jay (@magistudios) always advises it.
Other sites I run are doing good with the CTR in SEs and I don't write meta description there either.
It's not a bad idea though and I might test it out on certain posts and see how it goes. :)
Many thanks for your suggestion.
Chris lee
I don't like writing them either, but when your post is in the top 5 on page 1 with a 1% CTR it's quite frustrating. It is certainly a better option than changing titles which could end up on the second page or worse.
Changing the titles will also cause 404 errors which will impact your SEO, because Googlebot will be trying to re-index pages that are no longer on the site because they now have new names. Definitely not a good idea to change the name of a post that has already been indexed.
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Do NOT change your titles! If you want better CTR you must experiment with different Meta Descriptions. This is what Google has been advocating for years, and it is what I do all the time.
Watch the Google video of Matt Cutts that I have on my blog post about why the Meta Description is important. Matt says that a well written Meta Description can increase CTR.
http://legitimatejobfromhome.com/what-is-the-meta-description
Thanks for that buddy. Much appreciated. I'm gon give it a try.