Organic CTR

In this guide you will learn more about the Organic CTR (Click-through-rate) metric seen in Keyword Explorer.

Quick Links

• Overview of the Organic CTR Metric
• The Nitty Gritty Details
• What’s a good score?

You will see the Organic CTR for a keyword noted in the Explore by Keyword section of Keyword Explorer as well as within your Keyword Lists.

Organic CTR (Click-Through-Rate) in Keyword Explorer helps you identify keywords with click-hogging SERP features like ads, news, knowledge graphs, and so on. This metric estimates the percentage of clicks that are available to traditional, organic links in the SERP. Higher Organic CTR means that there are fewer distracting SERP features and more space for classic organic blue links to shine through. Lower Organic CTR could help you to identify other opportunities for those keywords outside the top 10 blue links. For example, if you're seeing Image Packs, you could optimize the images on your site to try to get a boost in the rankings.

Organic CTR is an estimated relative click-through rate for organic web results. It estimates the percentage of clicks that are available to traditional, organic links in the SERP. A lower Organic CTR score doesn't necessarily mean you should discard that keyword. It's an indication that other SERP Features are present and should be investigated further.

If you're ranking well for that keyword, you could be in a good place to win the Featured Snippet or target other features like Images or Videos.

• Learn more about SERP Features

A higher Organic CTR means that there aren't many non-organic SERP results, like Ads and Image Packs, giving you a better chance of ranking organically. If you're doing classic, 10-blue-links style SEO only, 100 is the score you want.But don't forget those lower Organic CTR scores for identifying other SEO opportunities. If you're optimizing for SERP features, and you appear in a featured snippet or the image block or top stories or any of those others, you'd probably be very happy to find that CTR was going to those non-web-results sections, and scores in the 40s or 50s would be great (so long as you appear in the right features).

Have you spotted paid ads or shopping results for your keywords? Maybe it's time to look at those avenues in addition to organic results to drive more traffic to your site.