Awesome ranking (place 1/2) but my CTR is damn low! Some thoughts...

[PascalKremp]

Hey all,

with a few projects I'm ranking really great. Having a good amount of impressions with terms that have decent search volume.

Webmasters shows:

1. "tax consultant city" Ranking 1.4 => 1056 imp => 3% CTR
2. "seo city" Ranking 1.2 => 329 imp => 1% CTR

Whats up here?

1. Competitors are seaching a lot but not clicking?
2. Brand issues? Can't believe that.
3. Title is boring? German titles a are longer... So I don't have enough room to play. Should I get rid of important keywords? Maybe I don't need them to rank? Gives me room for tests.
4. Local Box is steeling all the clicks? We are in the local listings and above.
5. Payed Ads are steeling all the clicks? At this point we don't use AdWords because of high costs and our great organic rankings

It would be great to hear your thoughts.

Cheers
Pascal

[EGOL]

I see the same thing.

I rank #2 in the organic SERPs for a really good money term... and I have a really low  clickthrough rate.  But, there are lots of ads above me.... and image results above me.... and shopping results on the right....  and more ads on the right.

I bet google is making buckets of money from all of those ads and the big beautiful images in the shopping results.

[DirkC]

Hi,

Click rate seems incredibly low for 1.4 position. With no additional info it's very difficult to asses what could be the cause. Normally title+meta description are the elements which are important for you click rate (for local only the title). May be the copy could be improved?

Would it be possible to add a screen copy with the actual search results (you can always black out your brandname / url if you want to keep that private)

When I check my own sites in Webmastertools - the only case where I get such low click rates is when people are looking for images, and Google is displaying the image box on the top of the results with 6 images. Even when we are the second image that is shown, the click rate is only 2% (this figure is also coming from a German site).

In Local search results key info (like location, phone number,...etc) is revealed without the need of clicking to the site, which could also lead to low click rates (guess this is probably more in the case of tax consultant than seo)

rgds,

Dirk

[paints-n-design]

Hi Ralph - I am german to, so would you tell me the target city that i can take a look at the SERP?

Competitors are seaching a lot but not clicking <- yes a lot, special SEO Berlin etc. ectremly. I asked some SEOs here in Berlin. Search it x-times a day

title isn't boring - the #newland factor we have, let people klick nearly everything, sad but true. "SEO | SEO | SEO & SEO" would be klicked if its on P1.

One thing, with our local 7 box and the max. 3 results above, when the local 7 box is shown a lot of people think "all above is adwords" . I testet ist with nearly 100 people, 30 thought its adwords, 20 just clicked adwords cause it looks so clickable