Do Click-Through Rates Really Matter in SEO?

When it comes to SEO, you’ve probably heard that it is important to track the click-through rate (CTR). It is commonly believed that the higher the click-through rate, the more people have visited your site. However, this assumes that you have visibility for your site activity to ensure that these are non-bot users. In addition, a recent experiment indicates that CTRs may not actually have a huge impact on rankings.

Previously, it was believed that the click-through rate had an impact on rankings because there seemed to be a positive correlation between a higher click-through rate and higher rankings in the search engines. Up to now, research had not been done to see if there was actually a causal relationship between these two events. It was just assumed to be so.

This experiment, done by Bartosz Góralewicz, and submitted to Search Engine Land, revealed that clicks are not a ranking factor for a site. The reasoning is that if clicks were considered as a ranking factor, there would be an increase in the search engine rankings. The findings indicated the search rankings actually fell with higher click-throughs for a site. While the researchers do not know yet what is the guaranteed cause of the findings, they did have some theories.

The researchers speculated that CTR is no longer a ranking factor for Google in 2015, the experiment was not correctly set up, or there were other factors that could have influenced the rankings that were not included with the experiment or known.

However, the results of the experiment did indicate that CTR likely does not guarantee an improvement in rankings. These facts indicate that click-through rate may not always be considered. Therefore, improving your click-through rate is should not be considered as a reliable method for improving your rankings.

That said, it may not be completely useless to pay attention to the click-through rate because of the fact that you still need to see when customers are paying attention to your content and which types of content they prefer. If you need to improve the click-through rate for your site, you should follow these tips:

Write concise content. Whether it is your site content or the meta description for your site, make sure that you keep things short.

Update your content regularly. Make sure that you update your content regularly so that when the user clicks on to your site, the content is always relevant to the search query. This can also help to lower the bounce rates for the pages of your website.

Use catchy phrases for headlines. Using more exciting headlines that match your brand and have the appropriate keywords added in can help to attract more attention and more clicks.

If you are still trying to figure out the best ways to measure the performance of your SEO campaign, Infintech Designs can help. Click here to contact us now for a free SEO review for your website.