6 tricks to boost the WordPress CTR rate [2017]

6 tricks to boost the WordPress CTR rateOnce your website is already ranking well in search engines, it means that you have built your engaging content and you already have the needed backlinks. Then it’s time to optimize the most important metric of all – your click-through rate.

The click-through rate is the number of times people see your website in the search engine results and actually click on your link to see your content.

You can have great content and tons of valuable backlinks, but if people don’t actually click on your site, you will never be able to fulfill your potential.

In this article, we’ll share 6 tricks to organically boost the WordPress CTR rate.

Keep in mind, these tricks will not magically boost your website to new heights. You will have to have a strong foundation of good content in order for the visitors to actually spend some time on your website.

To see how to boost your website rankings, check our list of 9 WordPress SEO tips.

If you already have good content, however, using even half of these tricks will most likely result in a positive uptick of website visitors.

Writing reviews? Use shcema.org markup

If you have seen a review result in the search results with several stars to indicate the quality of the product, this is the schema.org markup in action.

The schema.org is a collection of advanced markup tags, that can tell bots more information about the nature of each page. Using these tags, you can indicate that a given page is a review, provide a short review snippet and rate the product or service with 1 to 5 stars.

There are multiple plugins that can help you integrate the schema markup into your pages and boost your WordPress CTR. Check our guide on the best free rich snippet plugins for WordPress.

Not a news portal? Remove post dates

Depending on the type of content you have, having dates can be both beneficial and negative.

If your content is time-sensitive, for example, news, reports, research papers – having dates will allow you to rank higher for related searches.

However, if your content is “evergreen”, meaning that it will remain relevant for years to come, having dates can have a negative effect. If a visitor has to choose between two articles, one without a date, and one dated from a few years ago, they will most likely choose the one with no date.

post dates on evergreen content

In the picture above you can see an excerpt of the search results for the term “inbound marketing”. These are the only two entries with a date, located at the bottom of the page. Put yourself in the shoes of the visitor – would you click on a presentation that is several years old? The same page would perform much better if the date was hidden.

To hide the dates from your titles and URLs, you can modify the permalinks structure from the WordPress settings manually from Settings – Permalinks. The best choice in terms of SEO is just “Post name”.

Another option is to use a plugin, like WP Meta and Date Remover.

Remember that for optimal results certain types of content such as breaking news and the like should have dates which are updated on a regular basis. Erasing dates is recommended for evergreen types of content only.

Add the current year to your SEO title

There have been multiple studies which indicate that people prefer newly-released content. However, as we already stated, evergreen content can be relevant for multiple years, with small updates if necessary.

A quick solution to that is the addition of the current year in the title of your post. For example, a post that says “Best dog leashes 2017” will attract more clicks than one that simply says “Best dog leashes”.

However, if your website has a lot of posts, adding the year to each one of them and then changing it next year will be too much effort.

Instead, you can create a small shortcode, which you can later include in the title of each post. Simply add the following content in the functions.php file:

/**
* shortcode to show the current year
* name of the shortcode: [year]
*/
function output_year() {
$year = date("Y");
return "$year";
}
add_shortcode('year', 'output_year');

When you are finished, you can now write “Best dog leashes [year]”. Each year, the title will change automatically to reflect the current year.

Keep in mind, the WordPress admin will only show the shortcode [year] instead of the value. Only when you see the page on your website you will see the actual year.

Use short and concise URLs

Every SEO professional you ask will tell you the same thing – you should use short URLs. This will help you increase your WordPress CTR rate and the number of visitors.

A 2-5 word length is considered optimal for permalinks.

Don’t forget that the title and the URL of the page don’t need to be the same. For example, the following title “10 best AMP plugins for WordPress reviewed” can correspond to the following URL – “amp-plugins-wordpress”.

long urls vs short urls

In general, shorter URLs are easier to remember and are preferred by the search engine bots, too.

Use Google AMP

AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is an initiative by Google to provide a special framework for sites that want to serve better optimized and faster loading content for mobile users. Google doesn’t prioritize AMP pages in search results, but they use a special icon to inform the user about them.

Initially, the AMP project had a limited scope, but today anyone can become a part of it quite easily. There are multiple plugins that will automatically make your website AMP-ready:

With Google having a whole separate index for mobile search, having an AMP site will give you that slight edge in the eyes of the user, as they are more likely to click on the link with the lightning icon next to it.

Therefore, integrating AMP in your site has a high chance to boost your mobile WordPress CTR.

Add a Table of Contents to longform posts

Jump links are small links that appear on your site in the search engine results page. They allow the user to jump to a specific section of the web page directly from the results page, allowing the user to more quickly discover the piece of content they need.

Jump links in SERPs

To have such jump links, you need a table of contents in your page.

Creating a table of contents can seem like hard work, but there are plugins that allow you to create one in seconds. A good example is Table of Contents Plus. Check our guide on how to add a table of contents in WordPress to see how it works.

Оnce you have your table, Google will extract the jump links from it and show them to users after a search. However, jump links will not be shown every time, but only when they’re relevant enough to the user query. Even so, your WordPress CTR will be increased in the long run.

Another advantage of the table of contents is that you are more likely to be included in the Google Answers. They are direct answers to search queries that are shown on the top, before all other results.

The best part about being the top answer is that you don’t need to rank #1, you can rank #8 and still appear higher than everyone else.

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We believe that these 6 clever tricks will help you improve your WordPress CTR rates.

Remember that the quality of your content is what matters most. It should be relevant, grammatically correct and attractive for your targeted visitors. Then, you can take full advantage of our suggestions to increase your CTRs and make your site more popular than ever without spending a dime.

 



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