How to increase CTR without losing rankings?

[dickbaker]

By now it's pretty clear that Google is including the click through rate as part of its algorithm for ranking. If I have a page that's ranking #20 or #30 for a phrase, it's pretty clear that changes have to be made to increase the CTR.

But what about pages that are already in the top ten? How can you change any aspect of a good-ranking page without risking losing its first-page ranking?

I don't think I've seen this question asked before, so I'm asking it. ;)

[Robert Charlton]

Without either accepting or rejecting the premise that increased CTR => higher ranking...

Changes to the meta description should not affect ranking algorithmically, so that would be a good place to start. A good meta description, containing your most likely-to-rank targeted phrases, can very definitely help CTR.

[tedster]

How can you change any aspect of a good-ranking page without risking losing its first-page ranking?

Given that you probably already have good relevance signals in your on-page factors, the most immediately powerful ranking boost would probably be more backlinks. The era of jiggling with on-page factors, beyond a certain point, seems to be past - your question acknowledges that you appreciate this. However, if the page is missing any best practices for communicating relevance, such as a solid semantic structure, you could beef that up.

And paradoxically, adding an outbound link with the keyword as part of anchor text can sometimes pop rankings a bit. In my experience, anchor text is not just a backlink factor, it's also an on-page factor. So give your visitors a chance to visit another on-theme resource, if you don't already do that.

If the ranking page is internal to your site, look for any sub-optimal internal linking and beef it up. If the page is your home page, then "market it around" a bit, finding other on-theme sites who might be interested in recommending it to their visitors through a link.

Also, make a scrupulous inspection of all linking to that "page" to eliminate any problematic canonical URL possibilities.