How to Understand, Measure, and Improve Your Organic CTR

What Is Organic CTR?

The number of people who click on a link in search engine results pages (SERPs) represents the organic click-through rate (CTR). This metric is expressed as a percentage.

For example, say there are 100 searches for “blueberry pie.” A link to your site shows up every time in the results. Your page receives 10 clicks.

Your organic CTR would be 10% (10 out of 100).

Here’s the formula:

Organic CTR is an important SEO key performance indicator (KPI) that you should track to gauge how well your site is performing in search.

The higher your organic click-through rate, the more organic traffic you should expect from Google and other search engines. (This assumes that the number of impressions remains consistent.)

It’s often used as an SEO metric to understand if your pages are resonating with searchers.

Is Organic CTR a Google Ranking Factor?

No.

Organic CTR is not a Google ranking factor, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

Google uses CTR to test and measure other changes to the algorithm and overall quality of search results. But a higher CTR will not directly improve your page’s ranking.

In other words, you can’t trick the Google algorithm into ranking your page higher by simply performing searches over and over, clicking on your own site from the organic search results.

That would make the SERPs too easy to manipulate.

On the flip side, having a low CTR won’t hurt your rankings directly.

Additionally, tracking this metric can give you a better...