Click Through Rate (CTR) Curve

Each site has a unique click-through rate curve. This is based on a number of factors:

• How strong your brand is
• Number of Google ads displayed above the queries your site ranks for
• Other search features that appear above the SERPs you are listed in
• Quality of your meta title and descriptions

Calculating your own site’s organic click-through rate curve requires getting all the queries your site ranks for, over a given period of time, and then putting those queries into ranking buckets from 1 – 10. You can then work out the click-through rate for each bucket based on the total clicks / total impressions.

Thankfully the Click Through Rate Report in SEOTesting does all this for you…

The Click-Through Rate Curve report in SEOTesting also allows you to remove brand keywords from the graph calculation using RegEx. This allows you to see the CTR curve for non-brand search terms and helps you get a more accurate baseline of the CTR your general content should be achieving.

Why is a CTR Curve useful?

While it’s an interesting graph to look at by itself, it becomes useful when you find keywords that are under or over-performing the CTR Curve.

Look for patterns

Over-performing keywords – is there something about the meta title or description you can replicate on other pages?

Under-performing keywords – Are you using that keyword in your meta title and description? Time to do some experiments.

When you see underperforming keywords in the table, you’ll also get an idea of the number of extra clicks you could get if you were able to improve the CTR up to your site’s CTR Curve.

Sort the Potential Clicks column in descending order, and you’ll see your biggest potential keywords to target.

Check on Search Intent

If the click-through rate for a particular keyword is well below the curve, is the page from your site targetting that query matching the searchers intent? The easiest way to check this is to Google the keyword and see if your content type matches the others in the SERP that Google is returning.

Should you be running Google Ads?

You can also use your CTR Curve to decide whether you should be running Google Ads for bottom-of-the-funnel keywords that you rank well for but, for example, have a low CTR due to a block of four Google Ads at the top of the SERP.

How to find your CTR Curve report

Your site’s CTR Curve report is in the Reports -> Click Through Rate Opportunities section of SEOTesting.