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Traffic but no clicks? Optimize your SERP for more organic clicks

Rich Keller • Sep 23, 2022

Double your clicks from existing organic impressions.

Traffic but no clicks? Optimize your SERP for more organic clicks

If you get decent impressions and rank in GSC (Google Search Console), but it's not turning into any traffic, your page may lose those precious clicks to your competition. Never mind your ten-second elevator pitch. It would help if you impressed your searchers in milliseconds with how you appear in the SERP.

What's a SERP?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. It's the info you see after typing something into Google. Usually, if it's a popular query, you will see an entire scroll worth of paid ads and featured snippets before you get to the organic search results. See below.

Below is a SERP for "pizza in New York." Because of this type of food search, the search intent is most likely to want pizza right now. In their infinite quest to give the correct search result, Google has filled the top portion with google map info of the closest pizza restaurants. Great, but these are the SERP results you can control. Scroll down a little and...

Below the Google maps info, you get to the organic search results. Now, these results are pulled directly, for the most part, from your page content. Your Title and Meta Description are what Google will display here unless they try to help you and adjust this text according to the search intent. In most cases, Google samples something from your content and replaces the Title and Description. But that is a whole different blog post.

How to Control Your SERP and Get More Clicks

74.3% of the time, Google displays what you've provided in the SERP, so if you rank on page 1 or 2 but get no clicks, it's entirely your fault. But don't worry; you can fix it.

An excellent spot to start is looking in Google Search Engine for the Keywords you are getting impressions on. Look at the impressions you are showing up for on pages 1 and 2 because doing this next step and those page 2 impressions should help get that onto page 1.

So looking at the keywords, you are getting impressions but no clicks. You can start to compare if those keywords even show up in your title or description. If you are still ranking reasonably well, it's a good indication that your content is doing all the heavy lifting, but your title and description need to be more apparent. Try updating your title and meta description to something that mentions those popular keywords you are getting impressions with and makes it more enticing to click.

Which result would you click on?

Here is an example of 2 restaurants getting the same impressions on GSC, and one is getting all the clicks.

Both of these titles are for pizza: (These are Real)

Pizza - Additional Charge for Extra Toppings, Minimum 2 Required
Voted #1 Best Pizza Restaurant - Free Delivery - Order now and Get 2 FREE Drinks!

Now the only difference here is the text shown to the customer. The first result is generic pizza, and they are already trying to charge you extra before you even start ordering. Not very enticing.

The second result claims to be the best pizza, they'll send it to you for free, and if you order now, you get free drinks. Um, yes, please! Click.

Now it's more complicated than that. In a competitive space, you will have to get creative and keep trying different combinations of titles and descriptions to see which one gets more clicks.

If you recall, I mentioned that Google might not even use the title and description you've worked so hard perfecting in some cases. So while you need to be aware of how your pages in the SERP look, only worry about optimizing it for the keywords you intend to go after with that page. Sometimes you will get impressions on seemingly unrelated keywords, and Google may adjust the SERP to match the keywords only because you may have some content within that page that Google thinks may be helpful to the searcher.

Ideally, Ensure your title is clear and enticing, your description sums up your page intent, and your content is valuable. You should be ok. But if you can't get any clicks, you should audit all your titles and descriptions and revise them to try and get those clicks.

You May Also Ask About SERP Issues

SERP

Google Organic Click-Through Rates in 2014- We've all been there. Trying to improve our organic rankings so we can get more traffic from the search engines. And every time we do that, we are left with some big questions in our minds, like: How much traffic would I actually get if I rank on the first page? This post offers a new study of click... (moz.com)
13 Ways to Improve Your Organic Click-Through Rate- So you have a website built, but nobody’s visiting? It can’t be the page copy because you already checked that. The problem could be that you’re not getting enough organic search traffic. There’s an old joke in the SEO world that if you’re looking for a good place to hide a dead body, the second […] (neilpatel.com)
Organic CTR- Strategies, examples and case studies to help you improve your organic click through rate in Google’s search results. (backlinko.com)
Organic vs. Paid Clicks: These Are Not the Clicks You're Looking For- ... (wordstream.com)
How Organic Search CTR is Impacted by Google's Search Features (perficient.com)
12 Proven Steps to Boost Your Organic CTR in Google- Improving your Organic CTR means more traffic for your website without necessarily having to improve your ranking. Here are 12 things you can do. (searchenginejournal.com)
Understanding your organic click-through rate (CTR)- We’re taking on organic CTR — a fickle but useful SEO beasty — so that you can better test and measure your SEO efforts. (getstat.com)
2020 Comparison of organic Google click-through rates by ranking position- Keyword research data reveals the click-through rewards for top of SERP organic rankings - our Google 2020 summary | Smart Insights (smartinsights.com)
New Findings Show Google Organic Clicks Shifting to Paid- One large e-commerce brand noticed a startling shift in organic CTR, with paid ads now earning nearly the same percentage of clicks as organic results. What does this mean and how can sites combat the new trend? (moz.com)
Search Console reports - Analytics Help- In this article: Search Console data Landing Pages report (support.google.com)
49% of all Google searches are no-click, study finds- However, organic search clicks outnumber paid nearly 12 to 1. (searchengineland.com)
5 Things We've Done to Increase Our Organic CTR by 300%- In this blog, I’ll tell you about the five things that we’ve done to increase our organic CTR and how you can apply those to your business moving forward. (blog.marketo.com)
Pay Per Click vs. Search Engine Optimization - Google Ads- Does Google Ads support SEO rankings? Should you invest in SEO vs. PPC? Read why SEO and Google Ads are both important for your business. (ads.google.com)
Organic search results - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
Google CTR in 2018: Paid, Organic, & No-Click Searches- When Google's search results look like this, content creators, web searchers, and Google all win. When they look like this (or this, or this, or this), (sparktoro.com)
Paid Organic Query Report (developers.google.com)
40 Unbelievable SEO Statistics You Need to Know (searchenginepeople.com)
(pubs.acs.org)
We Sent 750 Organic Clicks To 7 URLs- While Moz and WordTracker have covered the impact of organic CTR on the SERPs, we have yet to publish raw data showing our findings, until now. (novasolutions.ca)
Search Ads Pause Study- Why run a search ad when your brand appears in the organic results? Never underestimate the power of paid search. Read the study at Think with Google (thinkwithgoogle.com)

Topic Clusters

Topics referenced across search results organized in clusters:

searches
organic search
Search Engine Optimization
search query
search volume
search engines
mobile searches
Zero-click searches
search ads
search terms
content
table of contents
content creation
post about content
content sneak preview
content marketing strategies
visual content
rate
click-through rates
bounce rate
organic click-through rate
average click rate
average clickthrough rates
positions
ranking position
average position
second-best position
factors
ranking factor
key factor
relevant factor
study
Google Organic CTR Study
industry study
snippets
featured snippet
Rich Snippets
news
bad news
Featured Snippets Google New
analysis
CTR analysis
SEO gap analysis
listings
organic listing
Google Product Listing

Statistics

Factual sentences referenced across top search results:

Also relevant for a comparison is how CTR is defined for the other three studies previously conducted: Optify defines CTR as "the percentage of users that clicked on each position, given that a user clicks on a top 20 organic ranking. ( moz.com )
On average, 71.33% of searches result in a page one organic click. ( moz.com )
Page two and three get only 5.59% of the clicks. ( moz.com )
On the first page alone, the first 5 results account for 67.60% of all the clicks and the results from 6 to 10 account for only 3.73%. ( moz.com )
In case you wonder where the other 23.08% of the clicks are ( moz.com )
It is believed that people who search for keywords with high commercial intent ("buy 4k LCD TV") are more likely to click on the first results than people who perform basic informational searches ("where is the nearest thai restaurant"). ( moz.com )
Dear Philip, To be safe I recommend clients to take 1% conversion rate on there website (sometimes even 0,5%). ( moz.com )
A lot of times it's not worth the time, effort, and money we put into optimizing a page for a specific keyword because we likely won't be able to crack the top 3 or #1 spot and the increase in conversions doesn't outweigh the input. ( moz.com )
I would rank #1 for a keyword or phrase and get about 35% of the estimated traffic. ( moz.com )
Actual company site links only represent 18.5% of matched queries. ( neilpatel.com )