CTR of SEO vs Ranking
It goes without saying that the better you rank organically on Google, the higher your organic CTR would be. But by how much exactly? What does ranking on position one, two, three, and so on actually means? And how does it defer for the different types of keywords, and is there a difference by device and does brand awareness actually matter? And also, why CTR changes while rankings remain unchanged?
So let’s dig in, and look at some of the data in our Ultimate Search Console report in Excel.
So looking at the graphs above, a few main things come to mind. First of all, the only positions that really matter on Google are mainly just positions 1, 2, and 3 (their CTR is relatively strong). But what if you are rankings at positions 4 and below? That simply means that if you focus on optimising let’s say p4 pages, you may see 5x (if not bigger) increase in Clicks. So what you should do is to focus your optimisation efforts where it is likely to make the biggest impact (pages on positions 4 & 5 are good to start with). On the other hand, you probably wouldn’t like to prioritise anything below position 5 (for now).
But why is Organic CTR lower on Mobile than it is on Desktop?
What is also striking when looking at the graphs above is the fact that ranking on top of the page (p1-p3) on Mobile is not as impactful as it is on Desktop. And why is that? That typically is related to Paid Ads (i.e. Google Ads), and the fact that Mobile is a much smaller screen, meaning that only those who scroll down the page will see the organic results (paid ads are likely to take the full screen). So let me rephrase it as it is very important. PPC is much more likely to cannibalise Organic results on Mobile than it is on Desktop. Therefore, even if your are ranking really well on Mobile, remember that you are competing against Paid Ads (own and competitors). So if you are not optimising for Blended Search CTR, you are likely to be losing market share.
Does Brand matter?
Definitely yes. As per the line graph below, position 1 for a brand query shows much higher CTR (2x) that the same position (1) for a generic query. CTR or Brand queries pretty much always exceeds CTR of generic query ranking at same position. But that is not a big surprise. Query strongly defines the intend of the user, and we do know that brand queries most definitely are navigational queries.
But what if we take out brand queries out of the equation? In other words, does Brand awareness impact CTR of Generic queries? And again the answer is yes. Refer to the two bar charts above. One representing a small, unfamiliar brand, and the other representing a large, international brand (both operating in the same industry). Both graphs show Organic CTR specifically for generic (i.e. non-brand) queries. You see in there, that p1 CTR of a large brand is over twice as high as p1 CTR of a small brand. We see similar difference for p2, p3 and so on. So brand awareness really does make a difference, and will often be more important than the organic rank.
CTR changing while rank stays unchanged?
You may sometimes wonder how it is possible that your organic rankings haven’t changed, but organic CTR has. In order to better understand this, let’s again look into our Ultimate Search Console report, and specifically let’s look at Organic CTR by page rank.
As clearly shown on the graph above, organic CTR may be strongly volatile, especially position 1. A few things might be causing this:
more/less Paid Ads appearing (might be your own ads or ads of your competitors)
featured snippets, news and other similar content might be temporarily appearing before organic results
device mix change (to rule this possibility out, always look at this data separately for mobile and separately for desktop)
Whatever the cause of CTR drop (at stable rankings) is, there is very little you can do about it (unless you want to spend on Paid Ads of course, but be mindful that the better you rank organically, the lower the incrementality of your Paid Ads will be). And remember that these drops in CTR may be just temporary, especially when driven by news and other short lasting content. So focus on making sure that your rankings remain stable, and treat CTR is a secondary metric.