Page 1 rankings, almost no clicks. My CTR recovery experiment.

Post original

Running a small QR code SaaS. Spent months treating rankings as the goal, then actually looked at the click data and realized I had been optimizing for the wrong thing. Sharing the teardown in case it saves someone else the detour. Here is what I pulled for the last 28 days: 44,749 impressions 229 clicks 0.51% CTR average position around 9.9 So the traffic is there in theory. Google shows my pages to people. They just do not click. Around half my clicks come from branded searches and the homepage, which sits near 13% CTR and is fine. Everything else is the problem. The worst offenders are my comparison posts. One of them (basically "my product vs [big competitor]") gets 6,128 impressions a month at position 7 and pulls a grand total of 6 clicks. That is 0.10%. Another sits around position 8 with 3,500 impressions and 3 clicks. Page 1 rankings doing basically nothing. Here is what I think is going on after actually looking at the SERPs: I rank for competitor brand names. I show up at position 6 for a competitor's exact brand name. Nobody typing that brand wants my alternative, they scroll past me. Impressions go up, clicks do not. My titles are generic. A lot of them read like every other result on the page. Nothing that makes a thumb stop. Some of these queries have an AI overview or a fat featured snippet eating the clicks before anyone reaches the blue links. So ranking was never really the problem. The click is. What I am changing: Rewriting titles and metas on the high impression, dead CTR pages, leading with the specific thing the searcher wants instead of my brand name Cutting or reframing the pure "vs competitor brand" posts that only pull curiosity impressions Trying to win the snippet on the informational queries instead of fighting it Going to redeploy, give it three weeks, then pull the same report and see if CTR moves. Happy to come back with the after numbers, good or bad. A few questions for people who have done this: High impressions and dead CTR at position 6 to 9, do you push for a better position first or fix the title first? Do "vs [big competitor]" pages ever actually convert for you, or is it a vanity play? Anyone got a clean before and after from just a title and meta rewrite? Curious how much CTR realistically moves.   submitted by   /u/New_Magician4336 [link]   [comments]