The CTR formula
CTR = (clicks ÷ impressions) × 100. An impression is one time your result appeared; a click is one visit from it. 120 clicks on 8,400 impressions is 120 ÷ 8,400 × 100 = 1.43%.
What is a good click-through rate?
There's no single number. As rough rules of thumb that hold across many sites:
- Position matters most. The first few organic results get the large majority of clicks; CTR falls steeply as you move down the page and drops again on page two.
- Branded queries (people searching your name) have much higher CTR than generic ones, so a site with lots of branded traffic looks better than it is.
- SERP features (ads, featured snippets, AI Overviews, People Also Ask) push organic results down and reduce CTR at the same position.
- Search intent changes things: queries answered on the results page itself get few clicks whatever you do.
That's why published "average CTR by position" tables disagree. A better benchmark is internal: in Google Search Console, compare CTR for pages at similar positions and focus on the ones far below the rest.
How to find your CTR in Google Search Console
Open Performance → Search results, switch on Average CTR and Average position, then view the Pages or Queries tab. Sort by impressions and look for rows with plenty of impressions, a position under about 10 and a CTR well below similar rows.
How to improve CTR
- Put the main keyword and a clear benefit at the front of the title tag, and keep it from truncating (use our title and meta length checker).
- Write the meta description as a promise of what the reader gets, and echo the words people searched for.
- Prioritise pages with high impressions and a mid-page position, where a better snippet is worth the most extra clicks.
- Re-check after a few weeks. Changes need time to be recrawled and measured.
Doing this across a whole site by hand is slow. The striking distance keywords tool and Search Console keyword research pages show how ElixRank automates it.