click-through rate (CTR)
Also called: click-through rate, ctr, organic ctr, organic click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who click your result after seeing it in search, calculated as clicks divided by impressions and expressed as a percentage. In SEO it reflects how compelling your title and snippet are for a given query.
What a healthy CTR looks like
Google Search Console reports CTR for every query and page, so you can read it directly instead of guessing. The formula is plain: CTR = clicks / impressions. A page with 1,000 impressions and 50 clicks has a 5% CTR.
There is no single “good” number, because CTR tracks closely with ranking position and query type. Backlinko’s analysis of 4 million results put average position 1 organic CTR at 27.6%, falling to about 15.8% at position 2, with the top result earning roughly ten times the clicks of position 10. Branded and navigational queries run much higher, broad informational ones lower. That is why you judge a page against its own position band, not a global average.
CTR is not a confirmed direct ranking factor, and Google has said it does not use raw click counts as a simple ranking input. Treat it as a diagnostic instead. A page ranking well (say position 3 to 5) but pulling clicks far below the range for that position usually has a weak title tag, a vague or truncated meta description, or is losing attention to SERP features like AI Overviews, sitelinks, or a competitor’s featured snippet.
How it affects your traffic
CTR is one of the fastest wins in organic search because it lifts clicks without requiring new rankings. A page at position 4 earning 3% against an expected 7% is leaving roughly half its available traffic unclaimed, and a sharper title or snippet can recover it within a crawl cycle or two. In an SEO Audit we pull your Search Console CTR by page and position, flag the pages that rank well but get under-clicked, and separate a copy problem from a SERP-feature problem so you know where a rewrite pays off and where you need a different play.
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