Are you suffering from the problem of high SERP rankings but low Clickthroughs? Then this post is meant for you. Targeted SEO strategies can help your pages appear in prominent positions in related searches but that does not guarantee that people will visit the link. In order to improve organic CTR, you need to implement a few more strategies. Here we are presenting a list of some WordPress tricks that when used can give a boost to your clickthroughs. Before you go through all the tips mentioned here, it is important to remember one basic rule. Always provide valuable and informative content to your audience. These tricks will work only if you have high-quality material to back them up.
One of the most widely-used content strategies is to create lists on different topics for a year. For instance, “the best WordPress outsourcing companies in 2019” or “the fashion trends to die for in 2019”. This kind of material is relevant during the year mentioned in the title. However, even if it appears in searches during later years, people will not click on it because of the outdated year. Adding a dynamic year in the title tag can help avoid this issue and improve your organic CTRs. Connect to your website through an FTP client and locate the functions.php file. Now, add the following code to the file, save it and upload it again.
When visitors will visit the post, the shortcode will be pressed into action and it will automatically show the current year. This means that all such annual lists of your website will always be updated.
Permalinks are a handy out-of-the-box feature in WordPress that allows you to define an optimized URL structure for your website. In order to make your URLs in search results more clickable, you must create short permalinks and slugs. Some of you will be wondering what is the difference between the two. Take a look at the image given below. The entire link shown in the picture is the permalink while the part enclosed in the red box is the slug.
Creating brief permalinks with a maximum of 5 words will arouse curiosity in the audience and prompt them to click on the URL.
You must have seen star ratings accompanying some results in Google. The rich snippets feature of the search engine supports a review type for reviewed content. This is what enables the display of the ratings. These review snippets can improve organic CTR by influencing the audience’s decision-making process. There are various rich snippets and schema markup plugins that can be used to leverage this feature on a WordPress website. However, remember that the page needs to be relevant to a search. It will also be pertinent to note that finally, it is the search engine that decides when to display the schema data. In case, a page is not a review then the schema may not be displayed.
Breadcrumbs are a helpful tool to simplify navigation and clarify visitor intent. The same strategy can be used to boost clickthroughs from Google searches. Take a look at the following image:
Users can see results for lenses and flashes but they also see the option for photo accessories. Anyone interested in the category will click on the link to visit the relevant page. You can set up Schema breadcrumbs for each page of your website. This will tell Google how it should crawl all the pages. There are plugins like Breadcrumb NavXT that will do the job for you.
People hate to wait for a website to load. Once they click on a search result, they want the page to be rendered immediately. In case, you have a slow website you will lose out on valuable traffic. Evaluate the quality of your page loading speed by using tools like GTMetrix. These solutions not only assess the speed but also offer suggestions to improve it. There are some good practices that all WordPress website owners must follow like enabling caching and using a CDN. Using code minification and image optimization will also be helpful. Improved speed will definitely increase the organic click-through rate of your website.
Jump links are another good tactic to encourage clickthroughs from searchers. Look at the link enclosed in the red box in the image given below. Anyone interested in the item will click on it to visit the page.
Google fetches these links from a properly formatted table of contents (ToC) as you would have seen on websites like Wikipedia. You can use table-making plugins to create efficient ToCs and leverage this feature for your benefit.
Getting a good position in relevant searches is only half the job done and you need to encourage CTRs to generate good traffic. HireWPGeeks is a dedicated WordPress web development company that also helps its clients in SEO. You can contact experienced SEO experts by dropping an inquiry through phone, website, or email.