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Somehow I have 9 pages that appear as #1 on Google search, at least according to the Google Search Console, and yet I don't even get 25% clicks on those results (24 / 104 = 0.23 or 23% CTR). Any idea what could cause that problem?

My website is The Linux Page. The picture below shows the first page of the Google Search Console which shows 9 pages having been shown as #1 for 104 searches (i.e. 104 impressions.) Yet, the corresponding number of clicks is 24.

What could cause people not to click even though Google thinks that my pages are the best answers. Note that all of these are relatively old pages so I would not put it on something like "Google is testing those pages" (which I've seen with some of my brand new pages and either working great--rarely--or not doing anything at all, at least for a while--more likely!)

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    Have a look at the search results. There may be lots of ads, answer boxes and other features that are distracting from your listing. I'd say 25% is fine for #1 in a lot of search results.
    – Tony McCreath
    Jun 16, 2018 at 7:49
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    Another recognised domain in the SERPs? Old date in the SERPs? Google's description in the SERPs favours another result? Human nature?
    – DocRoot
    Jun 16, 2018 at 9:18
  • @TonyMcCreath Ah, for the first one (qt version) I see that the #2 answer is from Stackoverflow... So I'm glad my page appears before Stackoverflow, but I could imagine many people clicking on that second link! No ads in my case.
    – Alexis Wilke
    Jun 17, 2018 at 1:05

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Your click through rate lines up with CTRs that other sites experience from organic rankings (via Advanced Web Ranking):

There are several reasons why the CTR for ranking #1 may only be 20-30%:

  • While #1 position has the highest CTR of any position, positions 2+ do get a significant share of the clicks. From the above graph, it looks like they get a combined 45% of the clicks.
  • A significant percent of searchers don't visit ANY of the results. For example 44% of Google News searchers just browse headlines. Instead of clicking:
    • Users may find the answer they need just from snippets.
    • They may give up.
    • They may revise their query.
    • They may click to something else like image search.
  • Even if you are in the top organic spot, there is likely stuff above you:
    • Advertising
    • Special results such as knowledge graph or image preview
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    I would add that 20% - 30% is very good! Sure some pages will perform better, but most pages get 10% or less.
    – closetnoc
    Jun 16, 2018 at 18:15
  • I know of one page that has images about RJ45 cross cabling and it definitely does show the image and I think many find that to be enough as that page doesn't get very many clicks even though it has tons of impressions...
    – Alexis Wilke
    Jun 17, 2018 at 0:54

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