Click through rates (CTRs)

Useful for: Measuring the impact of meta description optimisations or schema implementation

Be careful of: Not giving Google Search Console enough time to collect and process the data

Our preferred tool: Google Search Console

You could say that click through rates are the less sexy version of their cousin, organic search rankings. After all, if you’re ranking on page 5, there’s only so much benefit you can derrive through improved click through rates (CTRs).

However, many enterprise level SEO’s work for high authority sites who already have strong rankings, and the obvious next step for extracting SEO value is through improved CTR’s.

Enter Google Search Console.

The image above shows just how powerful Google Search Console can be in analysing click through rates. As well as showing CTR’s alongside average ranking positions for your site, you can also filter by specific pages or search queries.

For reporting, this means you can bucket different areas of the site by their CTR’s, thus easily showing any improvements which have been made by title tag, meta description of schema mark-up changes.

One word of caution though; Search Console often has a data lag of between 2 to 3 days, so if you make any improvements to your site give it at least a week before attempting to draw any conclusions over whether it’s made an impact. Also, be sure to mention this fact in your reporting so that stakeholders are aware.