How does an SEO company improve click-through rates?
By working on what a searcher sees before clicking, the title link and the snippet, on the pages where your own data shows that people see the result and pass it by. Google builds both parts of the listing automatically from several sources, so the work is not to control the listing but to give Google accurate, specific material to build it from. Done well, the listing tells the searcher plainly what the page offers, and the searchers it was written for can recognize it as the answer they wanted.
Finding the pages worth the work
The starting point is Search Console’s Performance report, grouped by page and then by query. The pages worth attention are those with many impressions and few clicks for their position, because the result is already being shown and is not being chosen. For each one, the queries reveal what searchers were looking for, and the question becomes whether the listing answers that.
Title links
Google’s documentation on title links states: “Google’s generation of title links on the Google Search results page is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web.” Its sources include the page’s title element, the main visible title, headings, og:title tags, other prominent text, and the anchor text of links pointing to the page. When the title element is half-empty, out of date, inaccurate, or repeated with the same boilerplate across many pages, Google may build the title link from those other sources instead.
So an SEO company starts by making the title element, the visible main title, and the headings agree, describe this specific page, and differ from page to page. Length is not a fixed number of characters: the documentation sets no limit on the title element, and says the title link “is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.” Repeating keywords works against the click: the same page warns that “this kind of keyword stuffing can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.”
Snippets
The text under the title follows a similar logic. Google’s page on controlling snippets states: “Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet.” It may use the meta description when that describes the page better than other parts of the content. A company therefore writes a meta description that summarizes what this page in particular offers, and also checks that the opening of the page answers the query clearly, because that text is a source of the snippet too.
Rich results such as review stars or product details make a listing larger, but structured data only makes a page eligible for them; Google’s structured data policies state that Google does not guarantee that correctly marked-up structured data will show up in search results.
Measuring the change
After a title or description changes, the company compares the clicks and click-through rate of the changed pages before and after, for the same queries and comparable periods, and checks that Google is showing the new wording. Pages changed together in one batch, alongside similar pages left unchanged, give a clearer reading than one page on its own. Ask the company to show you that comparison for each change, and treat any promise of a specific click-through rate as one that no one can keep.