How to Improve Your Organic CTR Using PPC Testing

By Emma Grant
| December 8th 2022

Emma Grant

Head of SEO

Results-driven Emma heads up our SEO team. A champion of best-practice SEO strategies for search engine success that lasts and delivers best value, Emma’s work focuses on boosting clients’ online visibility with the ultimate goal of increasing sales. Emma applies her extensive skill and experience to create strategies that pay off quickly for faster results. She knows precisely what to do to reduce clients’ paid ad spends for greater profits, and how to boost organic leads for better long term return on investment. After close of business, when she’s not organising exciting travel adventures, you may hear Emma strumming classical guitar tunes or working on her jazz riffs.

A good organic click-through rate means you’ll get more traffic landing on your website, without necessarily having to boost up your search results rankings. Here’s how to boost organic CTR with PPC testing.

What is organic CTR?

Let’s start with the science bit. A good organic click-through rate (CTR) is the number of web users who click on one of the links in the organic search results, divided by the number of times it appears in the search engine results pages.

Whilst you might have plenty of search appearances for various keywords, if people aren’t clicking on them, that means they’re not landing on your website. Which means they won’t be tempted to buy from you.

This is why it’s so important to not just focus on getting top ranking spots, but also on growing organic traffic by driving that organic CTR upwards. But not just driving it upwards from any old clicks. What you need are the clicks that will be valuable to your business. The ones that will be most likely to turn into sales. So, how to do this?

How to improve organic CTR?

There are a few effective ways of improving your organic click-through rate.

You can entice with compelling title tags, descriptive URLs and well-written custom descriptions.

It’s also good practice to fix keyword cannibalisation. This is where multiple pieces of content are competing for the same keywords, which has the effect of spreading out organic clicks.

Also, if you make use of structured data markup such as Schema, it helps Google better understand why your page is the best answer for a particular query so that it delivers the most relevant search results to users. And when search results are more relevant, they are more likely to receive clicks.

So there you have your most common ways of improving organic CTR. But there’s something we’ve left out, and that’s PPC testing.

How to use PPC testing to improve organic CTR

One of the most effective and yet most underused ways of improving organic CTR has to be PPC testing.

All you need to do is identify a keyword that has a low click through rate, but that you rank highly for, and then create a paid search ad for it.

As well as increasing your visibility in the search results for that keyword and making it more likely to get clicks, you also get to test different headlines and descriptions to identify which works best.

You can then take a look at your Analytics and see which have worked best for you, and which haven’t had much of a result. Once you’re clear on what works and what doesn’t, you can make the relevant changes to the headlines and descriptions of your organic listings. It really is as simple as that.

Looking to improve your online conversions?

PPC and organic SEO campaigns are well known for working in harmony. If you are considering the best strategy for boosting your organic click-through rate, talk to Figment. Get in touch with our SEO agency in London if you want to find out more. We only wear white hats in this office. We’ll evaluate your business goals and target audiences, and then tailor an SEO strategy to ensure you get the organic traffic you need to achieve them.