Will users click on my search result listing?

When it comes to search rankings, it’s common knowledge that higher listings get more clicks, and a lot of energy and resources are spent to get as high up as possible. However, much less energy is spent optimizing the listing itself to be more enticing to users, regardless of their position in the results.

This can be a missed opportunity, as the text in the listing itself is a key factor in determining the click-through rate it will achieve, and is something you can more easily affect than your ranking. It’s worth optimizing, regardless of your position. The trouble is that it’s difficult to measure and optimize your listing in the real world, where you can’t easily modify the title, URL, description, and ranking to get a reading on its performance quickly.

With a first click test, you can test alternatives for all of these attributes in a controlled testing environment, allowing you to optimize your listing confidently.

Remember to test each variation separately using a variation set to ensure that participants are unique across all of your tests. Set the scene for participants by telling them who they are and what they’re trying to achieve — but avoid leading the witness by using keywords in your question that appear in the image.

Test against real listings for your target phrase. They’re your actual competition for clicks. Expect the top results to get most of the clicks! The goal is simply to improve your click-through rate, wherever your listing falls in the results.

When you’re looking at results, there’s no magic number to aim for. Optimization is the goal here, so test your current listing against as many options as you can think of, and go with the option with the highest click-through. You can also ask for text responses, but primarily, you’re not looking for attitudinal data here. This test is about raw performance, so break out the variation set and get creative with the alternatives!