Impressions and Clicks go down CTR goes up, opinions/experiences?

[cooler29]

Hi Everybody!

TLDR: One of my big content sites for the last 1 year dropped 95% of traffic, slowly and proportionally; it started in September 2023.

For many years, the site has been updated, always quality content, improving old, adding new content, and so on, with no penalty, no manual actions, and no server issues. So this is "algorithm thing" I would say. I am for long time in business and had checklist for such situations.

Anycase, something I have never see before is what I want to ask for your experiences: for years site ranked for many keywords on 1st page , positions 1 -8 and had standard CTR. Now in last 1 year, all words dropping to positions 30-70 and have doubled CTR compared to previous period.

Any ides how same keywords have 2 times better CTR when are on page 5 than on page 1 in Google SERPS ? :)

[not2easy]

Hi cooler29! Have you examined your logs to see the percentage of humans to bots? In general people find about 50% of their traffic is not human. See this thread where that is discussed: [webmasterworld.com...]

[cooler29]

Hi not2easy and thanks for answer! :)

Data I provide are from Google search console so I suppose there is no bot traffic there.

[not2easy]

The only way to know for certain what is visiting a site is to examine the logs on your host server. It records every hit and shows the request and UA. GSC records traffic from their serps to your domain. Not likely that bots perform searches but that does not mean your site is free of bot traffic.

[NickMNS]

This is a result of how Google Search console reports its stats, and is misunderstood by many people. Impressions are not a count of all occurrences of a given keyword in Google search. An impression is only counted if your site appears on the search result page. For example if a user searches the term "widget" and your site will appear on page 3, but then the user clicks a link on page 2, that would not be counted as an impression. Conversely, if the user does get to page 3, but clicks another link, then that impression is counted. Furthermore, if the user clicks on your link on page 3, then it counts as an impression, a click and impression both figure into the CTR calculation.

Now to answer your question, the reason CTR rises is that fewer people ever make it page 3 so most of those impressions aren't counted. Whereas when you are on page 1 nearly every impression was counted. CTR is a ratio of clicks / impressions. Basic fractions math tell us that if the value of denominator falls the value of the fraction (ratio) increases. A drop in impressions tends to result in an increase in CTR, but not always.

[cooler29]

Not2easy, I understand what are You talking bout, checked logs and everything, no bots, nothing unusual...

[cooler29]

NickMNS, also thanks for asnwer.