Click-through Rate
Also called CTR, Organic CTR, Search CTR.
Click-through rate (CTR) in SEO is the percentage of users who click your result in search results out of the total times it was shown — a measure of how compelling your title, description, and SERP appearance are at a given ranking position.
What it means
Click-through rate measures what fraction of users who see your result in a SERP actually click it. Search Console reports CTR as clicks divided by impressions. A page appearing 1,000 times and receiving 30 clicks has a 3% CTR. Average CTRs vary significantly by position: position 1 averages 25-35% CTR; position 10 averages 2-3%. This gap means improving CTR from a high-ranking position generates traffic equivalent to significant ranking improvements.
CTR is influenced by multiple factors beyond ranking position: the quality of the title tag and meta description, the presence of rich results (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, sitelinks that expand the visual footprint), whether the query is branded or non-branded, which SERP features appear above the result, and whether an AI Overview appeared on that query. AI Overviews suppress organic CTR significantly on informational queries — often by 30-50%.
Whether CTR feeds back into ranking is a longstanding debate. Google has confirmed that user engagement signals factor into ranking, and CTR is one of the most direct engagement signals. Evidence suggests that significantly above- or below-average CTR for a given ranking position correlates with subsequent ranking movement. The practical implication: optimizing title tags and meta descriptions for CTR is high-leverage SEO work regardless of how this debate resolves.
Key takeaways
- Position 1 CTR averages 25-35%; position 10 averages 2-3% — the gap makes CTR optimization highly valuable
- AI Overviews suppress CTR on informational queries, sometimes by 30-50%
- Rich results (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns) increase CTR from the same ranking position
- Significantly above or below average CTR for a ranking position correlates with subsequent ranking movement
- CTR
- Organic CTR
- Search CTR
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Organic Traffic
Also: Organic search traffic, Unpaid traffic, SEO trafficOrganic traffic is website visits that arrive from unpaid search results — users who found your content by searching on Google, Bing, or another search engine and clicked a non-paid result.
AnalyticsRead moreSERP
Also: Search Engine Results Page, SERPs, Search resultsA SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is the page a search engine displays in response to a query — containing organic results, paid results, and increasingly, AI-generated answer panels, featured snippets, local packs, and other rich features.
AnalyticsRead moreTitle Tag
Also: Page title, SEO title, Meta title, <title> elementA title tag is the HTML element that specifies a webpage's title — displayed as the clickable headline in search results and used as a primary on-page relevance signal by search engines.
On-page SEORead moreMeta Description
Also: Meta desc, Description tagA meta description is an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a webpage — displayed below the title tag in search results and used by Google to generate snippets, though it's not a direct ranking factor.
On-page SEORead more
Knowing what Click-through Rate is, is the easy part.
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