Search
Your pages get clicked about as often as their ranking suggests
seo.gsc-low-ctr
Why this matters
A page can rank well and still be ignored. What somebody sees before deciding whether to click is the title and the description Google shows, and a page whose click-through rate is far below what your own other results at the same position achieve is being passed over for a reason that has nothing to do with its ranking. This is the cheapest traffic there is to recover, because the page is already winning the hard part.
Who fixes it
You can, usually
Roughly how long
twenty minutes per page
Care needed
Low risk to change
How to fix it
Search for the page's own main query and look at your result next to the ones above and below it. The title is doing most of the work: it should say what the page gives somebody rather than what the page is called, and it should not be truncated. The description is not a ranking factor and is often the whole difference, because Google will write its own from the page if yours is missing or generic — and what it writes is rarely as persuasive as a sentence you chose. Change one page, wait a fortnight, and compare.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 14 points off your search score. This one is a measurement rather than a fact about your markup, so two scans of an unchanged site can legitimately differ a little.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 106. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther search checks
- Canonical tags point somewhere validA canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. When it points somewhere wrong — another domain, a dead page, or the wrong protocol — Google follows it anyway, and the page you wanted indexed can be dropped in favour of one that does not exist.
- Content has been updated recentlySome content is meant to sit still, and age alone is not a fault. But prices, opening hours and staff pages that have not been touched in over a year are usually wrong by now — and a visitor who acts on the wrong opening hours does not come back to check whether the rest was right.
- Descriptions are a sensible lengthLong descriptions get truncated mid-sentence; very short ones waste the space you are given.
- Each page has exactly one title tagA page can only have one title. When there are several, the browser and Google each pick one — and they do not always pick the same one, so what you see in the tab may not be what appears in search.
- Each page has one main headingSeveral top-level headings makes the structure of the page ambiguous. Worth checking rather than urgent — modern HTML permits it, and Google handles it, but it usually signals that headings are being chosen for their size.
- Every page has a main headingThe h1 is the headline of the page. Without one, both visitors skimming and search engines parsing the page have nothing telling them what it is about.