All businesses want more traffic. You work your tail off to make Page 1 and then more time to get into Top 3 and maybe even #1. But the traffic never comes? Maybe you have a horribly low CTR but solid conversions?

This episode will dig into some tests, some resources and some ideas on what you can do to improve your own CTR in Google and Bing.

Improving CTR Resources

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And the a deeper dive by Aleyda can be found at her recent article that talks about this exact topic – improving CTR. As we talk about in the episode, notice the first step in the flow chart? Is the page relevant?

Before you even worry about your CTR, take a look at your page and make sure they are relevant.

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Not SEO but we have seen people test emojis in Title Tags and some interesting data non the less. SEJ did a big test of their emails for a month, Emojis in Email Subject Lines: Do They Affect Open Rates? [DATA] and reported on their findings – some good, some bad but all somewhat interesting.

At Moz there is also the recent article and test Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate which is another test and angle around improving your CTR.

Professional vs. Increasing CTR

Whatever you do or test, how will things impact your brand? Will using ALL CAPS or emojis make your brand look bad, childish, amatuer or will it have no effect?

No matter what you test, note the Moz study in all the things they watched. How do the changes you make impact rankings, clicks, impressions and even conversions. Do you get more clicks but not more conversions. Is that good traffic? Or what if you get less clicks but more conversions? What is your goal?

Follow the Pack but Know When to Hang a Left

If you were to target “canva alternatives” and notice that everyone has a list that includes a number – think what you can do to be slightly different.

• They list numbers – can you have more or less?
• Instead of a list of ALL, what are the 3 best?
• What can you do differently?
• Is the query even relevant to you? Is the page ranking relevant?
• Test everything.
• Add brand. Remove brand. Try different call outs. Remove call outs.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00 ] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Are you guys excited to have you join us on another one of these exciting podcast episodes? We’ve got Dave over there. How’s it going? Dave? Dave

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:18 ] is here.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:18 ] All right. So

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:20 ] present and accounted for

Matt Siltala: [00:00:24 ] gotcha.

Well, let’s just jump into it. So today, I don’t know if this came from a tweet that you saw or an article that you read, but the title that we’re going with right now, guys is ways to test and improve your organic CTR. And so, maybe Dave just kind of set us up and, and, what made you think of this one?

And we’ll go from there. Well, it

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:47 ] come from, a test I did with a client last November, December, and then I’m working with a client right now where we just did something in recent weeks. And we’re already seeing, bumps and jumps and [00:01:00 ] traffic and impressions and clicks and rankings, but it’s working on and improving your CTR from Google and being, and, you know, you’ll.

You’ll see tons of doomsday predictions and yes, we are seeing less clicks from organic traffic and even less organic opportunities. Yeah. okay. At least from a typical blue link, you know, you can have images and videos and you can, we can argue that separately, but we’re just talking about, you know, your normal page, trying to get traffic from, you know, that number two, you are number one or number eight, listing on Google and being, how do I get more people to click, even if I’m a little bit further down.

Or number one, even how do I keep getting that high amount of traffic? And it came from that. But then I also saw, a lady did something recently, Cyrus over at Moz just posted something. And then there’s been some other stuff where, SEJ tested 3.9 [00:02:00 ] million emails, just a few, over a month or two, I think it was.

And they tested putting emojis. And their emails.

Matt Siltala: [00:02:09 ] Yeah, that one was the interesting one. And we were chatting about this a little bit ago, but I,

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:14 ] no,

Matt Siltala: [00:02:15 ] I haven’t read that. Well, I do when we’re, you know, we’re when we’re chatting back and forth, but not in an email subject line, but it’s like, I was telling you when I see any kind of emoji or anything like that in an email, I automatically deleted it.

And I didn’t read that case study. So you’ll have to let me know if it kind of coincides with their findings, but. Anytime I get anything like that. I usually just delete it. Cause in my mind, I’m like spam. I don’t care about your stupid emojis. Get it out of my email inbox

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:43 ] and that the, it basically their data showed and their data was for, you know, SEJ so it’s targeting professionals.

If you want to call us that, that to SEO, social media, PPC, content marketing for so-and-so. What’s that

Matt Siltala: [00:02:59 ] somewhat [00:03:00 ] professional,

Dave Rohrer: [00:03:00 ] somewhat professional for the most part we’re professionals, but it actually showed, you know, based on their data and their AB testing, what they could, the emoji open rate was lower for the month or two that they did the testing.

Matt Siltala: [00:03:16 ] And it would be interesting too. And that makes sense, like with what I just told you, whether it also, you know, it makes me think about other things like. You know, back in the day when I used to sell a lot of stuff on Craigslist, now it’s just easier to sell it through, you know, a group on Facebook or something marketplace or whatever.

but, I look back at some of the things I used to do and I used to put a bunch of like asterix and then like, big words and then like just something to get your ad. Yeah, exactly. Draw your eyes to it, you know, probably against the terms of service, but like, I used to do stuff like that. And it would draw people’s eyes to your ad and it would get a lot of people clicking on it and it, and it was a successful.

And so I wonder if there’s a difference between using an emoji [00:04:00 ] in like, a situation like that, where it’s in a, it’s in a headline versus an email subject line.

Dave Rohrer: [00:04:06 ] Well, and they even pointed out that, you know, if you’re a serious business, you know, like a lawyer or. You know, you’re targeting professionals, you know, maybe another B2B putting emojis probably makes you look not professional.

Yeah. So same thing, putting emojis or other, not traditional things, all caps or all lowercase or something in your page title and your meta-description when you’re trying to increase your CTR. Yes. You’ll stand out. But are you going to take a hit from. You know, not looking professional,

Matt Siltala: [00:04:44 ] unless it’s pizza hut or Domino’s or someplace, you know,

Dave Rohrer: [00:04:49 ] that’s part of your brand, you know, does it make sense?

Matt Siltala: [00:04:53 ] Yeah. Yeah. That’s

Dave Rohrer: [00:04:54 ] interesting. Which I think is a good segue into the [00:05:00 ] data or the testing that Cyrus did with MAs, where they decided to test in their SEO or their title tags, including your brand boiler plate category. And they kind of went down the list for the white board and a couple other things. Do they take out the category name?

Do they take out the brand name? Do they leave it in? When do they leave it in? what’s the boiler plate look like? When do they try it? When do they take it out? Does it improve rankings? Does it hurt rankings? Does it improve CTR? Does it hurt CTR? And these are all things that you can easily test and should, should be testing.

Matt Siltala: [00:05:35 ] Well, tha