Knowledge Base
Does CTR Affect Rankings?
A case study from Moz confirmed that increased click-through rate had a positive influence on rankings. After crowdsourcing clicks to a website, the keywords went from rank seven to rank one.
What Google Says
From a Google Engineer: “[…] using click and visit data to rank results is a very reasonable and logical thing to do, and ignoring the data would have been silly. […] It’s pretty clear that any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking to improve the quality of search results. Infrequently clicked results should drop toward the bottom because they’re less relevant, and frequently clicked results bubble toward the top.” Source: www.quora.com/Did-Bing-intentionally-copy-Googles-search-results
In a Google Patent: “[…] user reactions to particular search results or search result lists may be gauged, so that results on which users often click will receive a higher ranking.” Source: patents.google.com/
So the short and sweet answer is YES! CTR Works. Google wants to improve its search results by delivering relevant content to them, and your click-through rates allows Google to know your content is useful.
