The ultimate goal for getting top rankings is not the rankings themselves, but actually getting more qualified traffic and from that, more sales, leads, subscriptions or whatever your macro conversion is. But today I am not writing this to tell you the obvious, rather I am here to state something out of the SEO world: it’s not the higher organic position that gets the highest click share in SERPs. Not always, at least.

The clicks are in the hands of the searchers and not in Google's hands. That means position #2 could get more clicks than position #1 if the searchers decide one is better than the other. We’re going to make that happen by deconstructing the anatomy of a SERP listing and improve each element in the snippet.

Predictive eye tracking heat map of SERP listings

Probably all of the SEOmoz readers are very aware of Google CTR reports such as the one below, and I know that my statement contradicts many of those reports. And that’s great, because what makes you a great SEO is that you always question the obvious, Matt Cutts :), you always think outside the box, and you always test SEO hypothesis.

The regular Google SERP CTR distribution

At the aggregate level, those numbers could be true, no argument about it. But, if you want to make it easier on your SEO success, aim for more than averages.

From the searcher's point of view, one eye tracking study show the following heat map:

You have rank at least #2 to beat the Top 3 AdWords ads

It’s not easy - and sometimes not affordable - to compete with PPC ads, but in an SEO world, that’s what it takes to be successful.

If you are reading this blog then you are also probably tracking rankings for your targeted keywords. In this case you are already one step ahead your competitors. Automate the tracking process with SEOmoz’s ranking tracking feature and you’re probably ahead many of them.

My guess is that since you are tracking rankings, you’re not just sitting there waiting for better positioning in SERPs to occur without doing nothing. I guess that you’re also doing the heavy lifting too: onsite optimization, link building, social media, link baiting or whatever it takes to improve organic search visibility.

The truth is that we (and that includes me) are so obsessed with rankings that we forget one other important part of the equations, the CTR. Sometimes we get so fixated to move a “golden” keyword from position #2 to #1 that we forget that #2 gets the same impression share as #1. That means both #1 and #2 have, theoretically, the same chances of getting the click.

The question is then why don’t we allocate more resources into actually attracting more clicks on #2, rather than investing months and months of link building, to grab the first place? Or, at least, why don’t both at the same time?

Let’s change that

The SERPs have altered a lot from two years ago, not to think of how they looked like five years ago. We now have rich snippets, author images, breadcrumbs, ratings, html entities, video listings, just to name a few. The classic listing (title, description snippet and URL) is losing ground against the rich listing and in five years from now I doubt there will be any classic (aka 2005’ish) listing in any search engine.

If you didn’t yet recognize the importance of SERP listing differentiators, take a look no further that their early adopters: spammers. Spam has penetrated the visuals of SERPs because spammers recognized that being different can generate higher CTRs, with lower rankings.

Below is a test done by cpcstragey.com that a show how easy is to spam the Google’s rich snippets. Don’t do it, please.

Now, let’s teach you how to beat competitors with plain text listings. After all, that’s why you read this post so far.

How to increase the CTR share in Google SERPs

First let’s start by analyzing the classic anatomy of plain text, organic Google listing. :

The classic listing in Google SERPs

There are three major components the classic listings, and we’ll look at how to optimize all of them for better CTR. They are:

1. The title
2. The URL
3. The description

The TITLE

In SERPs that contains only classic results (just text), the title holds the most weight for CTR. In this case you want to get the most of title’s copy.

Titles in SERPs usually come from your HTML code, but not always. In some cases Google will chose not to display the content of the TITLE element to better match the search query to the content on your page.

Here are some tips to get better click through rates and increase your chances of better CTRs that the guys above you:

Add Geo-Modifiers (City, State)

That is, if you target a local market. Take for example this search query, “auto glass Vancouver”. Not only that the second listing matches the original search query better, but the geo-modifier is emphasized in bold.

Which listing is matches the search query better and will likely get more clicks?

That was easy!

Use Holiday Specific Titles

Change the titles when you get closer to holidays or “X”-days (mother’s day, boxing day, Black Monday, Cyber Friday and so on). Better, implement default titles outside holiday times and use templates to automatically update titles to address search pattern changes. Use Google Trends to see when a search pattern is changing.

Change title during Holidays to match search pattern changes

Forget Branding (Unless You Really Are One)

You should not place your brand name at the begining of the title, unless you really are a brand or try to build one. Amazon can get away with not starting the product page title with the product name, but it is not recommended for lesser known entities.

Amazon can afford to start the title with a brand name

Use Character Savers

If you need to squeeze more text in the title you can replace word like “and” with the ampersand (&) symbol, “or” with the slash (/) or “copyright” with ©. Remember to implement special chars using HTML entities (& with & © with © and so on).

These character savers not only save you precious display space but also increase gaze time.

Use Strong Calls to Action

Your page titles act like headlines within SERPs, and one of the most important elements tested in advertising and conversion rate optimization is the headline.

CTAs are strong verbs, strong unique selling propositions (USP) or promotional words. Sometimes store/inventory-wide promotions can affect CTR also. An example of a promotional title can look like “All Digital Cameras 60% OFF ……”. There’s an interesting thread on this subject here.

Capitalization

Test capitalizing the single most important word in the title. An entire title written with caps lock on will raise spam flags, so don’t do it. Capitalizing each first letter of the word is acceptable.

Competitive Differentiators

If your target market responds well to particular features or benefits which are parts of your unique selling proposition (i.e., lowest price guarantee or 110% price matching) or competitive edge (i.e. the only authorized retailer for a product/line), use it to attract more clicks.

As per May 2012, there is no semantic markup (please correct me if I am wrong) from schema.org that you can use to alter the titles displayed in Google or other search engines. However, there’s plenty of semantic markup for to alter the description part of the listing.

That takes us to the second element from the anatomy a SERP listing,

The URL

Of the three elements of the SERP snippet, the URL probably has the least impact on CTR. Often times, your URLs are created at the back end, based on predefined rules which can be difficult to change.

However, there are a couple of tricks aimed to improve CTR, based on the displayed URL:

Breadcrumbs

Most of the times the page URL gets displayed in the listings, but Google also shows breadcrumbs:

Yummy Food & Drink à Pizza

And that breadcrumb is your chance to increase CTR. This article from Google explains how to list them. If pertinent for your site, go and implement it right the way.

Targeted country

If you set up a targeted country in your Google Webmaster Account, Google will display it next to the URL:

If I were to live in Singapore the US site won’t appeal to me

If someone from Singapore is looking to buy a Samsung Galaxy S2 probably he will not click on the site that shows as being from United States (due to shipping fees, duty, taxes).

If you want the targeted country displayed next to your listing, use you Google Webmaster Tools account.

Finally we’ve reached the most important piece of all,

The Description

This is where the magic lives. You can alter the look and feel of your description in so many ways: images, social media data, ratings, product pricing and availability, just to name a few.

Images

The element with the highest impact on CTR will be, of course, the images. When a text listing is displayed next one that displays an image, the image one will grab the attention and clicks.

Let’s take a look at the previous pizza search query and compare image rich snippet recipe listings with plain ones

Where are your eyes attracted to?

Given the above results are #1 and #2, the eyes will focus on the second result and most likely there will be more clicks on it.

Now let’s look at the predictive eye tracking heat map.

Well, quite predictive result, isn’t it?

Now, go an implement semantic markup for images:

• For software applications
• For products
• For recipes
• For events

Take a look at this nice SERP:

The listing is enriched with app’s icon

It’s impossible to know if #3 gets more clicks than #1, but chances are higher for the listing to get more clicks with this rich snippet than without.

Considering what conversion rate optimizer are saying about images, I would not be surprised to see a study that shows how text based listing are losing clicks to listing containing images.

Reviews

Now, let’s add the some review to this snippet to make it look even more appealing:

The same listing now has review ratings

You can find out how to add product reviews to your listings, here. You can even use reviews to markup testimonials for businesses, not only products:

Not a real listing, just a preview using the rich snippet testing tool from Google

Now that you know how to do it, please don’t spam like these guys below. Their testimonial page doesn’t show testimonials at all, but they brag with 2046 reviews. Only mark up testimonials and reviews if you have real reviews on the page landing page or at least somewhere on the site.

If you can prove that you have so many reviews I would be more than happy to change the screenshot. Just give me a shout.

Authorship

Do you write great articles and want better CTR? That’s an easy one. Just have your picture displayed in SERPs.

Here’s how it would like:

Someone is reporting 484% increase in CTR just by doing it:

484% is an extreme case but it can happen

Mind the picture you use. You better have a professional one, clear and nice, a head shot maybe. Unprofessional pictures can lead to an actual decrease in CTR.

Google+

Setting up a Google+ account and linking it with the author page will add even more trust elements, such as the number of people in your Google+ circle:

More trust elements = better CTR

To implement the author images, here’s the official guideline from Google.

ASCII Art

While this strategy will draw attention and CTR use it with caution. It will be flagged as spam. Take a look at this:

That’s a real listing from Google’ SERPs – The original belongs to seomofo.com

and the copycat to others

HTML Entities

I run a test on our about us page and discovered that HTML entities are displayed in the results, and actually they look pretty nice:

It looks intriguing but could it be flagged as spam too?

Here’s the source code for that:

<meta name="description" content="We'll help you&#13;&#10;&#10122;Outrank competitors in Google&#10003;&#13;&#10;&#10123;Dominate search engines first page&#10003;&#13;&#10;&#10124;See results in less than 3 months&#10003;&#13;&#10;CALL NOW &#x2706;1-800-617-4094">

Ok, that’s a lot of SEO ideas for one day. It will take you way more than few hours to make these changes, but as long as you start today, you’re on the right track. And who knows, maybe your new CTRs will be so great that it will actually move you up.

Once more, don’t abuse what you just learnt here. Good luck!

Image sources:

http://www.miratech.com/img/blog/2_liens_commerciaux.png

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PanB1F1qsNE/Tbzi6HNcKwI/AAAAAAAAALQ/yWw_bmiyIaQ/s1600/Google%2BSERP%2BCTR.png

http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Rich-Snippets-Testing-Tool.png

http://www.seomofo.com/img/dxbseo-stealing-serp-snippet.png

http://cdn.marketingtechblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/author-webmasters-640x450.png