You’re ranking on page one. Impressions sound healthy and promising. But what about clicks? Almost nothing. Well, this a common dilemma for SEO providers, especially in highly competitive niches and in some saturated markets/countries.
And then you might panic and start asking yourself: What could be wrong?!
The Tell-tale signs of low CTR niches and markets
Google search console is your source of truth here, If you notice low CTR after filtering the country and excluding all branded variations (using regex) in GSC despite the consistent increase in impressions, then this is a first tell-tale sign.
The next step shall be exporting all ranking keywords on page 1 for that country from Ahrefs, while excluding all brand variations. Then, calculate the total organic traffic for those keywords; this serves as an estimate of the potential clicks each ranking keyword could generate based on its search volume and position in SERP.
If you see a big gap between number of clicks from GSC & total estimated organic traffic from Ahrefs, then this would definitely mean you have low CTR issue for that country.
Calm down.. this might not be your fault!
This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything wrong by the way, it could just reflect too much noise in search results (4 google ads at top, local map listings before organic results… etc).
And now with AI Overviews showing at top almost everywhere at search (especially for blog/article content) while pushing organic results even further down the page, the situation has gotten significantly harder for SEOs, as users get their answer directly from Google’s Generative AI without ever needing to click any of the blue links!
What should you do in this case?
1. Leverage schema markup wisely to strengthen the semantic coverage of your website, and that should increase the probability of earning featured snippets in search results, therefore maximize clicks.
2. Prioritize other markets with less competition & less SERP noise. Start extensive keyword research from that point.
3. Use Google BigQuery API to figure out all non-brand queries that might be anonymized due to GSC limitations, compare the CTR of those anonymized queries in other markets/countries.
4. Focus on improving local SEO (Map listings) by getting more genuine and positive reviews.