You’re probably not thinking enough about your CTR, most people don’t, but it’s an important factor. After all, if you increase the number of clicks, your traffic increases, your rankings might increase (leading to more traffic) and you get more purchases and longer engagements. More purchases and longer engagements make you very happy, right?

So start thinking about your CTR and how you can improve it. There are a lot of ways you can achieve a higher click-through rate organically, so today we’re going to give you a few favorite tips of ours:

CHOOSE YOUR KEYWORDS CAREFULLY

If you aren’t thinking about keywords, you really should be, so we’re just going to assume that you already know that you’re using them. So let’s make them more effective. Let’s think in terms of PPC advertising. The default setting for AdWords keywords on Google is “broad match”, broad match is your friend… sort of. Because it means that your site is going to reach the widest possible audience, but it also means that many other similar results are going to come up alongside yours. Let’s imagine that you sell the best office chairs in the world, so you set ‘luxury office chairs’ as your keyword. When your potential customer goes to Google and puts that in, first, we get two adverts with exact phrase matches, and after that, there are also results for:

• Luxury leather chairs
• Office chairs
• Office and computer chairs
• Boardroom office chairs
• Ergonomic office chairs

This is all on page 1 of Google, need we go on? Anyone searching those terms is also likely to come across your page, but you’re also facing a lot of competition. Your other options are: “modified broad match”, “phrase match” and “exact match”. In Adwords, Modified Broad match gives you the chance to lock in a keyword (by adding the + parameter before the locked word) but may drop other words in the phrase. Phrase match will include your exact phrase and may add words before or after it, but not include synonyms. So your ad for ‘luxury office chairs’ won’t show up in searches for ‘luxury office furniture’ but would show up in a search for ‘discount luxury office chairs’. You’ll get more specific targeted traffic, but you also risk missing a lot of potential traffic who you could upsell to. Finally, we have the “exact match” which does exactly what it says on the tin, your site or ad will only show if someone googles your exact phrases, no additional or subtracted words and no synonyms. You’ll get traffic that is almost definitely looking for a product such as yours, but you’re going to miss everyone who is just browsing.

I hope you can see how thinking about the PPC match types can help you in organic search?

Let’s look at some tips specifically for organic search:

VARY YOUR TITLES

Even if your products are very similar, you should be titling them differently to test what works. It’s not enough to just reorder the words in your headline, and just adding different punctuation is definitely not going to make a difference. If your titles are along the same lines every time, it’s time to switch things up a bit. If you’re always talking like a hero, try being the villain, instead of telling someone what to do, tell them what not to do… the list goes on, but you get the idea. Approaching similar content from multiple perspectives gives you more ways to sell it, so be your own devil’s advocate and remember to test, test, test.

SOLVE A PROBLEM

Google gets asked a lot of questions, so sometimes, having an answer for your headline is the best option available. This means sticking to declarative sentences, tell your audience what visiting your site is going to do for them. Be bold and confident, try using words like: best, greatest, worst, stop, and avoid. Customers want results and they want them quickly, so give them what they want, and then hook them into the rest of your amazing content and products after. You may also be able to provide your answer, or at least the promise of an answer, in your meta description to get people to click through to your pages.

CONNECT WITH YOUR AUDIENCE’S EMOTION

Finally, no one likes to know that they’re being emotionally manipulated, but it happens to all of us, every day. Adverts make us: amused, happy, angry, guilty, and inadequate — sometimes all at once. Think about every animal charity advert you’ve ever seen on tv, they usually start with a close up of the animal, then show it in terrible circumstances, and then they show how your donations can make a positive difference. So that’s you: sad, angry, and hopeful all in one advert, and this doesn’t just happen with charities. Your favorite clothing brands do it, so does every supermarket; it’s not enough to show a product, you also have to show how it will benefit the consumer’s life. So choose an emotion, and find out what search terms will (ethically) trigger it. But don’t try to be ridiculously unscrupulous about it, no one wants to be responsible for the next Kendall Jenner Pepsi advert.