Summary: Low click through rates may result from lower ranking brand/household names pulling traffic away from your site, or from poor title/description tags.
Have you achieved number one positions in Google for keywords, but are seeing very low click through rates?
You can find this data in Google Webmaster Tools in the Dashboard for your site, which tells you the top positions you’ve achieved, how many impressions for those keywords, and how many click throughs
Above, you can see a huge number of impressions for the term ‘force majeure definition’ but very few click throughs. Why would this be?
The first possibility is that there is a lower ranking site that has a good brand or is a well recognised household name. In this case, Wikipedia and various other free online dictionaries are attracting most of the traffic. In a business context, you might have a recognised household name like Virgin or a recognised resource that appears below your result but which users are more likely to click on because they recognise the brand. There’s little you can do to combat this!
The second possibility is that your title tags and meta descriptions may not be up to scratch. Although your meta description doesn’t affect your search engine ranking, it will influence your click through rate as Google sometimes – not always – uses it in the search results so people can see what the page is about. You need to put time and care into writing good title and meta description tags to get more click throughs to your page.
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