Ideas for Improving CTR in SERPs

So I'm ranking for a keyword that deals with the upcoming year, but now that big name websites are writing articles involving the same keyword/topic, I've lost ground to an article from businessinsider and one from forbes. The only problem is I outranked them for about a month, but then suddenly dropped to 3. It really looks like those articles have been getting a better CTR than my site, so that's why I feel like they are at the top now. My appearance in search is clean, has a good meta title and description, while the other articles have autogenerated descriptions. But I feel like brand recognition is the reason their CTR is higher, is there any real way to combat this? I don't feel like putting up a bot net and clicking my own pages in the SERPs for a year...

One thing I noticed is that some sites have some structured data that is almost like authorship, it's a name in gray just to the right of the URL, and I'm thinking even a little more "beef" or size to my search appearance may help, does anyone know what structured data is used to get that gray name? I can't find it anywhere, I'm guessing its only for established sites and what not...

I'm pretty sure it's a CTR thing because 5/10 of the results for the first page are big name sites, and basically they all have pa/da of 1/90+. But 2 of them are now randomly outranking me...

You're more likely to get that "gray name" if your site has sitelinks in the search results plus a page for your site on Wikipedia or DMOZ.

You can try add social signals to your websites, this will help you. Most probably actively shared sites on social media rank higher, also the big names doing the same

FBGuru said:

You're more likely to get that "gray name" if your site has sitelinks in the search results plus a page for your site on Wikipedia or DMOZ.

Click to expand...

I noticed the Wikipedia correlation but not the DMOZ one. I'll look into that a little more.

Try modifying your meta descprition to look more like a "secret". Make the user feel like he needs to click if he want's to find out what's happening.

I always do that by adding "..." to the end of my description. Don't finish your last sentence, just cut it off before the important part and the you'll see the difference. I tested this across 5 different niches and got ~ 15-30% CTR improvement.

Did you try rich snippets? They've proven to be pretty effective to me.

lord1027 said:

Did you try rich snippets? They've proven to be pretty effective to me.

Click to expand...

The only schema markup/structured data that makes sense is breadcrumbs. There really aren't any rich snippets that are relevant.

The Mentalist said:

The only schema markup/structured data that makes sense is breadcrumbs. There really aren't any rich snippets that are relevant.

Click to expand...

I've used ratings for articles, coming from visitors. Good ratings attract clicks, basically they're rating the article, doesn't have to be a product.

Using the ... is brilliant. I will be testing this soon.