Click through rate crashing...

[Mcarle]

I have been on a pretty big content upgrade on my websites.

More content

5 pages to 14 pages

100 words to 500+ words per page

More images

More alt tags

This has increased my traffic & my click through rates due to a massive increase in impressions.

But because the impressions have gone up so much further my CTR had crashed.

I have gone from :

500--> 50

to

4500 -->70

In one month.

(Taken from Google webmaster tools)

Will having a much lower CTR hurt my ranking in the long run?

In the end I want more phone calls about my service so far I'm not yet seeing that conversion happening.

[EGOL]

Let's say that your old rankings were #3s #2s and #1s.

If the new pages and new keywords are ranking at #5s #6s and #7s then CTR would be expected to go down.  Right?

So compare average ranking to average CTR.

Alternative is that competitors have more appeal in their title tag.  Maybe offering free beer!

[Mcarle]

That does make a lot of sense.

So as I start to rank lower for MORE phrases the CTR will go down because those NEW terms start lower in the SERPS.

So overall, a lower average CTR WON'T hurt?

I also noticed that one of my images had a huge spike in image search traffic but had a higher bounce rate since the people clicking on it did not get to see more "dirty" images...

I'm having a hard time mulling over more general traffic VS less very direct traffic.

I don't want to be one of those sites that gets 1500 hits a day & no calls.

[EGOL]

I don't want to be one of those sites that gets 1500 hits a day & no calls.

I have sites getting 100,000 / day and no calls... but we run adsense.

Maybe you should start selling something... what impulse buy could you offer?

[Mcarle]

Just thought I would update on the situation.

I have just had a record month of calls and emails from positional clients.

Over 25 client contacts in 27 days.

By far a record May with 5 more days to go.

I'd say the new content is working well.