Does Organic CTR Impact SEO Rankings?
You can read this very interesting study here about it in
https://moz.com/blog/does-organic-ct...kings-new-data
Rand Fishkin founder of MOZ can explain a lot about it:
Which came first: the CTR or the ranking?
CTR and ranking are codependent variables. There’s obviously a relationship between the two, but which is causing what? In order to get to the bottom of this “chicken versus egg” situation, we’re going to have to do a bit more analysis.
We found on average, that if you beat the expected CTR, then you're
far more likely to rank in more prominent positions.
So, based on our example of long-tail search terms for this niche, if a page:
- Beats the expected CTR for a given position by 20 percent, you're likely to appear in position 1.
- Beats beat the expected CTR for a given position by 12 percent, then you're likely to appear in position 2.
- Falls below the expected CTR for a given position by 6 percent, then you're likely to appear in position 10.
And so on.
Here's a greatly simplified rule of thumb:
The more your pages
beat the expected organic CTR for a given position, the more likely you are to appear in
prominent organic positions.
If your pages
fall below the expected organic search CTR, then you'll find your pages in
lower organic positions on the SERP.
A simple example:
Here’s one quick example from our 1000-keyword data set. For the query: “email subjects that get opened,”
this page has a ridiculously high organic CTR of 52.17%, which beats the expected CTR for the top spot in this vertical by over 60%. It also generates insanely great engagement rates, including a time on page of over 24 minutes.
We believe that these two strong engagement metrics send a clear signal to Google that the page matches the query’s intent, despite not having an exact keyword match in the content.
Fishkin also says:
"I also highly encourage you to check out
Rand Fishkin's Whiteboard Friday discussing clicks and click-through rate.
In short, the key point is this:
If a page is ranking in position 3, but gets a higher than expected CTR, Google may decide to rank that page higher because tons of people are obviously interested in that result.
Seems kind of obvious, right?"
