Google Search Console: Avg position going up, CTR going down - how?

incognitus

Junior Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2014
Messages
174
Reaction score
76
It's a new website, a little over a month old - started getting decent impressions of late, and now the average position has started to go up as well.

Funny enough, my CTR is going down as the impressions and position goes up — is this normal?

Attaching a screen from GSC:

1656744911721.png


Any inputs will be greatly helpful.
 
Well, there are some things you should know of.

Past year or so, Google has been automatically rewriting site's title and description. So this, itself, has a slight impact on your CTRs as we can't create clickbaity or catchy titles and descriptions anymore.

Now, the next is since the core update last month and those prior, the search results layout have changed drastically.
If you google for anything, even if it is just questions seeking for informative content without any buyer intent, Google will stuff the search results with ads, ads, ads.

From shopping ads panel, to 4 paid ads listing at the top. If you're a desktop user, expect the knowledge panel at the side and so on.

All these are huge distractions to users and even if you rank first organically, your CTRs itself is heavily impacted.

And what if, say, you rank 2nd or 3rd? Well, here's the bad news for you, buddy.. Here comes Google's "People Also Ask" panel, "Videos" panel, along with Google local business listings nearby.


If you think that is bad enough, try searching for any buyer intent keywords/phrases like brand or product names. You will also see a huge image panel at the top.

Now imagine with all these major distractions, do you think your CTRs will be affected? Drastically, without a doubt.

Hence, as I always tell others, look at your GSC's performance section. Notice how wide the "impressions" and "clicks" have been throughout the past 2 years alone, especially since last month's core update.

And the scariest part? There's nothing you can do about it. Google has control of everything, and it is apparent they refuse to let webmasters piggyback on their search engine for revenue. They are doing whatever it takes to reduce organic traffic. That explains why users are now reporting signs of "throttled" traffic.


Last but not least, some may say, "Wait a minute, but why is OP's graph shows that his CTR was high at the start? That's right after the core update..."
Well, here's why: Google is now shuffling the search results more often like shuffling a pack of poker cards. So you could be ranking well for very long-tail keywords, if not, Google is showing dynamic display of search results with varying panels and ads, hence affecting your CTRs. Since the core update ended, people are still reporting nonsensical traffic patterns. Just check out those SERP sensors.

FYI: check out SERoundTable SEO discussion and so on. You will see many people posting evidence and proof of strange traffic anomaly.
 
Last edited:
Think of SERP results as "Ads". Google is always split testing the SERP.

Also, both the values are an average.

It can happen due to a lot of scenarios -

- Average Position is bumped when a few of your keywords start ranking higher - again this does not mean higher CTR.
- Average CTR plummets when impressions occur, but no click happened. This happens when there are better pages outranking you.

This is quite common when Google discovers new keywords / new pages on the site as that can throw the entire metric out of whack. It also could mean that the relevancy of your title is not semantically converting for the query that resulted in an impression.

You also need to take into account the impressions. You will notice that around the 28th - your impressions begin falling in a steep manner.

This could be because on 26th, with a rise in impressions your CTR still kept falling - this was likely when the SERP readjusted itself.
 
Back
Top