Click-Through-Rate, Rankings & SEO

In case you had any doubts that CTR has a direct impact on Google rankings, feast your eyes on this Search Analytics data:

On October 8th, a client relaunched their website and changed the title tag on one of the templates from “Keyword” to “Search”. They wanted to know why the organic traffic to those pages was tanking. It’s quite possible that Google saw the page as less relevant due to the title tag change but the Search Analytics graph for a sample query above implies that CTR suffered before rankings did. The updated page title was indexed within 24 hours of the launch. Google immediately changed the display of the title in the blue link to be less targeted. It didn’t say “Search” but it took some important context out of the displayed title. For example, if previously the displayed title was “Local SEO Pleasanton”, it now read “Pleasanton”.

Of course one should be wary of one-off anecdotes, but if you are looking for a simple way to show your clients/teams that CTR matters, feel free to cut and paste!