6 Ways To Improve CTR in Google Search & Get More Clicks

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Improve CTR in Google Search
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Ranking #1 in a Google search is the best thing that can happen to your blog, and while it’s not impossible, it is certainly not easy.

When you are ranking among the sites on the first page of a Google search, but your site is not in the top three search engine positions, how can you use that rank to improve your position? 

This is an important question and one which requires a review of a few different techniques you can implement to get higher CTR from a Google search. I have tried and tested these factors and they have worked for me, so they should work for you too.

How to Track existing Google Search CTR?

The first thing you should do is check how much CTR are you getting from Google SERP. To do this, login to your Google Analytics account and head to Acquisition > Search Console > Queries. Here you will be able to see which all queries are bringing visitors to your website

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Similarly, instead of Queries, you can select Acquisition > Search console > Landing pages to see the pages which are driving maximum traffic and CTR from Google SERP’s.

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Let’s have a look!

Showing star ratings in a Google search is a powerful way to get more CTR. Not only does it make your results stand out within the search engine results, but it also helps in getting clicks.

Note: This technique should be used only for review articles.

It offers more information in the search engine and thus helps to drive more traffic to a webpage.

If you write review articles, such as web hosting or web app reviews, for example, you can use the Google Rich Snippet star rating to make your reviews stand out. These star ratings work to rank the product you are reviewing, and they clearly stand out.

With a star rating, you can easily make your review article stand out even in competitive keyword results. WP Review Pro is the best plugin for showing star ratings in searches, while also allowing you to add a review box in your blog post.

Google Search star rating
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However, this is a paid plugin, and perfect for review or affiliate site.

However, if you are looking for a free solution, you should use RankMathSEO WordPress plugin. It is a free plugin (best alternative to Yoast SEO), and let you add different schema type including product schema. In the product schema, you can rate a product (review article), and it would show star rating in the Google search.

Along with star ratings, you can also add a nice call-to-action button at the top or at the end of an article that will help you to get more CTR to the product you are endorsing. If you are a blogger in any niche and you review services, products, apps, mobile phones, etc., use this plugin and you will notice a great improvement in the Google search CTR to your blog.

2. Manage published/updated dates In Google SERP’s:

Dates are very useful for letting readers know when a blog post was written, thus allowing them to understand how recent the information they’re reading is.

When you have an older blog, despite having written and published evergreen content on that blog you may notice poor CTR from Google searches due to dates in Google SERP’s.

In such a scenario, you could rather show updated dates instead of the published dates to make sure, a recent date is shown in the search engine. Make sure, you show both the published date and updated date to give a clear picture to your readers.

Also, do not game this feature as Google has started penalizing pages, that don’t update any content but simply update the post to show the recent date.

Read the below tutorial to master this technique:

3. Intent-based Meta description and meta title:

This should probably be the first tip I offered in this post, but because it is among the oldest techniques, I am offering it last. Google and most other search engines use your meta title and meta description to show information in Google searches.

Writing call-to-action meta titles will help you to get better CTR, and writing detailed meta descriptions using keywords will help you to get better rankings.

Moreover, your meta title and description should be based on the user’s intent. This single tip alone can significantly increase CTR in Google search.

To make the most out of it, here is what you need to do:

  • Login to the Google search console
  • Click on Performance > Search results
  • Use “URL’s containing” filter and add the URL of page/posts that you are optimizing to get more CTR from SERPs (See screenshot below)
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Click on apply and this will show performance on search results like this:

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You should be able to see all the queries that is driving traffic to the page, along with impression, CTR, and position. Now, based on this data you can optimize the page meta title and description to increase the impression, CTR, and also position.

This is one very powerful technique to get more clicks from Google search.

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You can use plugins like RankMath or WordPress SEO by Yoast, and you can use it to write meta-post titles and descriptions that will help you increase your Google search CTR.

4. Use FAQ Schema:

This one is easy to implement for those who are using WordPress. This is the latest supported by Schema.org and works great for FAQ or content-heavy pages.

Before I show you how to implement this, let’s have a look at how this looks in Google SERP:

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Isn’t this eye-catchy?

You can easily implement this using the Yoast SEO plugin, which now supports FAQ schema.

Watch this video tutorial to learn how to do that:

Subscribe on YouTube

If you are using WordPress + Yoast SEO plugin, simply add the FAQ block in your content area and add the FAQ”s:

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You can find related FAQ’s using the following tricks;

  • Using the Google search console trick I have shared above
  • Searching for target query in Google and picking related queries from “People also ask”
  • Using a tool like Answerthepublic or forum like Quora

5. Implement Breadcrumbs

This is another permalink technique that has proven to increase CTR in Google SERP. Along with increased CTR, it also helps in higher ranking which adds more compelling reason to enable breadcrumbs for all website type.

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Most of the SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math have this as an in-built feature and you can enable it with a single click.

6. Implement better favicon

In 2020, Google has started showing website favicon in Google search results. If you are still using the default favicon that comes with your theme or your CMS, you should shift to custom favicon, and use this as an opportunity to increase your CTR, and brand yourself.

Here is how the favicon looks like in Google SERP:

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Adding a favicon to your website is easy, and here are some guidelines from Google on how to add a favicon. Here is a list of websites to create a favicon for your website.

There are other factors such as AMP,  video thumbnails, and instant previews that are also helpful in maximizing CTR from Google searches.

For now, if you implement the above-mentioned SEO techniques, you will be improving the way your blog post’s listings stand out in Google searches.

Use the comments section below to let me know if you use any other technique that helps you to improve CTR in Google searches.

If you find this article useful, don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Here are a few hand-picked guides for you to read next:

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

16 thoughts on “6 Ways To Improve CTR in Google Search & Get More Clicks”

  1. Shanif Khan

    Thanks for sharing this valuable information, I’ll implement the first one soon, while I’ve been using the 2nd and 3rd. Keep up the good work!

  2. John

    There are also other possibilities to separate keywords. For example, the use of an underscore is often beneficial, as per our initial results. The experiments show that URL variations with an underscore have slightly higher Click-Through Rate than variations using hyphens.

  3. Ary

    Thank you Hars.. those five stars will attract anybody’s eyes and do click immideatly. Can blogspot platform do the same thing ?.

  4. Rajkumar

    Hai Mr. Harsh. I am a blogger, recently i have watched your “WordPress SEO Basics for Beginners in Blogging Seminar” in Youtube. Now i have add some Plugins for my blog with the help of that video. Thank you. But i con’t add Google Authorship Image.

  5. androidbanget

    always failed to implement authorship, doh!
    when i check in rich snippet tool, everything seems to be ok (authorship verified). but my profile picture never appears next to the search result T_T

  6. Ravi kumar

    This article has said all basic techniques to increase your CTR. One point I liked too much, which is remove your post dates. Kindly share, how we can remove dates from Google SERP.

  7. FlaxG

    do Breadcrumbs really help us in raking our page and making users to navigate our website ?
    and is there any other alternative for Breadcrumbs where user can get Best Navigation to our posts ?

  8. Hamza Sheikh

    Yet another worth reading post.

    Harsh, I believe the correct usage of rich snippets in the search engine can also boost up the presence of links (ahead of Google Author Rank), and also improves the CTR.

  9. Sayeed Ahsan Khan

    Really Cool!… I am totaly agree with the authorship verification because I faced the same problem too when I uploaded the logo of my site as the Google+ profile banner… One more thing I would like to add in this post is the “Social Media activity” actually I have tried that If a new blog post is getting more than 50 tweets then it comes in google search ranking easily I know it won’t help that much but we can assume that it’s something like a back support if a link which is on the page 2 of search engine I am sure it will bring that link on page 1 if the tweet is done more that 50 on that post…

  10. Istiak Rayhan

    Hi Harsh,
    I want to add one more post. Using breadcrumbs in Google search can be a good idea. I think it make search result more clear.
    Thanks for the post!

  11. Pritam Nagrale

    Thanks Harsh for this useful information. All the 4 tips were very useful. Your article motivated me to do the changes right now.

  12. Manish

    This tips and techniques are seen useful. Specially date hiding technique from Google serp and going to implement on my own blog.

  13. wordpress

    Can you show how to hide dates from search engine, while keeping them visible for readers

  14. Nizam Khan

    Awesome post! Well, implementing Google authorship is really a great strategy to increase credibility and using meta description/title is really useful for better search engine rankings. Thanks Harsh for sharing this excellent info 🙂

  15. Shitij

    Nice tips and will implement them soon on my blogs…thanks for sharing

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