gregalbuto

M Posted 6 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

Click through rate, or CTR, is a performance metric that helps you understand your audience and what content resonates.

However, a good CTR doesn’t always mean higher conversions or better engagement with your site. If you have a high CTR but you’re not seeing purchases from those users, you are likely targeting the wrong audience.

How to get a good CTR?

There are several ways you can increase your CTR. Below are a few ways you can begin.

1. Write unique and informative copy. For SEO, this is your meta description, in PPC it’s your ad copy. It’s the text that entices users to click on your link. Without giving away too much, or an exact answer to Q&A content, leverage your copy to draw attention to your content for users to learn more.
2. Leverage structured data. Help your content stand out and grab the attention of users with structured data. Rich snippets have been known to receive more organic clicks. Optimize your pages using structured data to better your chances of receiving clicks.
3. Optimize for local SEO. Localizing your content is especially relevant today as Google continues to move to mobile-first indexing. Local SEO can help your brand stand out in local searches and drive more organic leads to your site. 50% of users visit a store within a day of searching locally. 

How to maintain a good CTR?

In order to get a good CTR, create quality content. You’ll want to start by choosing keywords, especially long-tail keywords, that have a high search volume and resonate with your audience. You can use Instant to pinpoint keywords that are both trending and work for your content.

Demo BrightEdge Instant!

Optimize your title, meta description, and/or ad copy with the keyword you want to appear for. For PPC, remember to use negative keywords as well. Leveraging negative keywords allows you to filter out queries that are less relevant. Some of the more common negative keywords would be “free” or “cheap” to avoid customers that aren’t looking to spend on quality products or services.

If you’re looking to increase CTR of an ad, consider adding a review extension to the copy. When potential customers are able to see that your brand is positively reviewed, you can increase your clicks by up to 66%.

When will I see an increased CTR?

Typically, you will see higher CTRs at the beginning of the customer journey while users are doing informational searches. You will typically see lower CTRs toward the end of the journey when users are making buying decisions.

You will also likely see a higher CTR from video content. An email with a video, rather than an email with just content, receives a 96% increase in CTR. Video content averages the highest click through rate of all digital channels. It is smart to consider adding a video or a link to a video in your content to increase your CTR.

While digital marketers regularly test out different ways to increase CTR and organic traffic and have discovered that some simply don’t work, there are tried and true ways to increase CTR. By getting creative with your meta descriptions and using an SEO-driven titles, you have a better chance of increasing your CTR and, in turn, your ROI as well.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years ago

t 9 min read

SEO share of organic traffic up from prior years

Released as part of its annual Share Conference, BrightEdge Research found that Organic and Paid Search dominate websites’ traffic in 2019 - 68% of all trackable website traffic is sourced from organic traffic and Paid Search, vastly exceeding all other channels, including Display and Social Media. The Organic Search figure at 53% is up from the 51% found in the 2014 research, the first year that BrightEdge Research conducted the analysis.

Organic Search remains the dominant source of trackable web traffic and in the dominant position as a channel. Paid Search continues to grow. Organic Social Media is flat since 2014 at 5%, and though ubiquitous, contributes on average 1/3 as much traffic as Paid Search and just 1/11 as much as Organic Search.

B2B Combined Search Organic Traffic Is 76% of Trackable Traffic

Despite several seismic shifts in consumer behavior, the rise of mobile search, and the dramatic changes to the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layouts, including Local 3-Pack, Knowledge Graphs, Videos, and Quick Answers, which push more organic searches below the fold, Organic Search is the channel that delivers the most organic traffic to web sites by a wide margin.

Why did organic share grow?

Over the last 5 years Google has invested significantly in enhancing the user experience by providing increasingly accurate and relevant search results and at the same eliminating from the SERPs distracting intermediaries using techniques that attempt to game the Google algorithm.

With the advent of Google’s RankBrain, its ability to map Internet content to search query intent has improved even further. As a result, consumers trust Google and rely on it even more and are using at a rate that exceeds the growth of display and organic social.

Download the full channel share report to learn more about the findings and review the data in tables and graphs.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

Website traffic describes the visitors who arrive on your page and the data you can collect from these visits. When these prospects visit your site, you have the opportunity to entice them to enter your sales funnel. Understanding how to build your website traffic is a critical part of building an online reputation. An estimated 94 percent of B2B buyers and 81 percent of customers research products and services online before making a purchase. There has also been tremendous growth in ecommerce, with an increase of nearly 15 percent in 2015. A site that receives strong site traffic will be better positioned to capture this revenue and grow their brand. There is more to successfully building a website, though, than focusing on the website traffic report. You want to time your scaling efforts to ensure that your site is prepared for the influx. This will not only maximize your profit, but it will also help you protect your reputation and build your relationships with those visitors. A successful website will be equipped to handle online transactions while also being organized to encourage people through the sales funnel. Ideally, your content should mirror the funnel itself. In other words, you want to have the majority of your content focus on visitors at the top of the funnel, while also creating some targeted and useful content for those further down the funnel. Links between different levels of content can encourage people to move through your site, engage with your material, and enter your sales funnel, eventually becoming paying customers. You will find as you start examining your site traffic that it is arriving from a variety of different places, including organic and paid traffic sources. Here is what all site owners should know about how to increase website traffic.  

What types of traffic should I examine on my website?

You should expect site traffic to arrive from a variety of different sources. The five most important ones that you will want to track and optimize for are:

• Organic traffic: meaning those who arrive on your site by clicking on results on the SERPs
• Social traffic: those who arrive on your site after interacting with your brand on your social media pages
• Paid traffic: those who land on your domain after clicking on an ad you placed on sites
• Email traffic: people who visit your site by clicking through a link that you had placed in an email message
• Direct traffic: Those who are familiar with your site and brand and just type your address directly into the search bar

While there are several different sources of traffic, it is important to remember that they are not all equal. Some traffic sources will bring more people to your domain than others. Namely, organic traffic brings more than half of the visitors to your page, on average. This means that your visibility and ranking on the SERPs is responsible for more traffic than your social, PPC, and email traffic combined. This is an important point to keep in mind as you begin the process of building traffic to your site.  

Understanding how to increase website traffic

The key to understanding how to increase website traffic revolves around being better in tune with what your customers want to see and providing it for them on your website. The better you are able to align with the needs of your prospects, the more enticing your site will become for people navigating the web.

How do I optimize for organic traffic?

Given that organic traffic drives more than half of the visitors who land on your page, the focal point of understanding how to increase website traffic comes down to SEO. Properly leveraging SEO can help you build your site traffic and drive interested prospects to your page, encouraging them to enter your sales funnel. Optimizing your content for SEO and organic search should be an encompassing process that begins before you even write a single piece of content.

1. Use keyword research to identify topics and vocabulary that will appeal to your targeted audience.
2. Create high-quality content that is optimized with the keyword appearing in the title, H2 tags, URL, alt text, and body.
3. Distribute the content thoroughly to ensure that you attract the eyes of those most likely to be interested in your piece to encourage backlinks and high engagement metrics.
4. Review the information supplied through the BrightEdge backlink checker to uncover opportunities to ask for backlinks to boost off-page SEO.
5. Monitor your progress with BrightEdge to see your success by page group and keyword group.

How do I optimize for other sources of site traffic?

For the rest of your traffic, there are also a few steps you can take to boost the number of visitors to your site.

1. Keyword research: this is not only for organic search. Keyword research will help you identify topics that are popular within your target audience. This will help you create emails, social media postings, and PPC ads that will better attract people to your page.
2. You can also boost your paid traffic by analyzing your sales funnel. You want to have a keen understanding of who your customers are and what they are doing at each stage of their buyer’s journey. This will help you create more targeted materials because you will have a better idea of what they are looking to read.

Monitoring your website traffic report and understanding how to increase your website traffic are important steps in the development of a successful website. Before you look at your traffic, first make sure your site is ready to handle the boost in visitors. Then begin to optimize your page for the different traffic sources, remembering always to keep your focus on organic.