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Ranking no. 1 for high volume keyword, no clicks, worth keeping the page?
Posted by on March 23, 2026 at 9:07 pmI have a page, 1 page, that generates 24k Impressions, ranks top 2 in Google Search, and gets cited first on AI overviews if you ask any question related to it.
Stats for the last 28 days, in GSC:
Average Position: 2
CTR: 0.2%
Impressions: 24.7K
Total Clicks: 38In the queries tab of GSC, there are 707 variations of the keyword, with the bulk ranking at positions 1 and 2. The highest Impressions for the top query is 2.5k, with 2 clicks, so CTR is 0.1.
The keyword is loosely related to the niche; I do not want to give too many details here. A close match is "time difference between London and Cape Town", and I want to rank for "motorcycle rental Cape Town".
Is there any sense in keeping this page, considering that CTR is as important as Google and Edward Sturm claims it is? Because although I rank first for this keyword, it is really screwing up my CTR.
I do think I get some brand visibility benefit… but how much of that is hard to say.
Does anyone have any insights on the future of this page? Should I keep it, prune it re-purose it?
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1 Reply
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It’s more about whether any of the things that page can answer will actually do anything to help you or the user.
No click things can have value if you get your brand in there and start building familiarity and trust. People often research some kinds of products for several weeks before getting to that by question – so there’s value in getting a bit of their attention early for those products that people research first. If you understand buyer journeys and user personas of your customers – it can make your conversion rates more than double – which more than makes up for the 50% of traffic we may have lost by the AI handling things.
But yeah – if it’s only tangentially relevant to anything that makes you money or makes them more likely to give you money later, then it’s pretty pointless. Any traffic you might get is useless to you anyway.
G.
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Position 2 usually gets about 19% of the clicks. So if there are 38 clicks that means there are about 200 searches.
edit – are you talking local SEO?
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Can I see the page? A little sales tweaking of the title tag may help
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Google looks at CTR per search query, not page or site wide. And since your search terms in this case rank 1 or 2, it clearly isn’t hurting them.
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What’s benefit of pruning it? Pruning pages doesn’t preserve PageRank, it doesn’t “optimize” crawl budget
Why don’t you broaden it?
How many keywords is it ranking for > position 10? Can you optmize twords those?
> A close match is “time difference between London and Cape Town”, and I want to rank for “motorcycle rental Cape Town”.
Can you add content to it?
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>Because although I rank first for this keyword, it is really screwing up my CTR.
Is that a KPI for something – like are you running a content placement contract for someone?
Sitewide CTR doesn’t affect your site. Its a page-per-topic challenge – and its relevant to other pages in the same index. Its not about Google penalizing you for a score.
I would just broaden it to find keywords in GSC that rank and get clicks
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I generally don’t see the harm in continuing to keep it, but don’t prioritize it and don’t expect any growth. Purposely tanking or killing pages that rank well because they don’t convert in favor of goosing your CTR with no end goal is not really sound logic.
Why would google rank an entire site lower because it appears in low CTR searches? Even if Google were going to punish your domain *as a whole* for something like that, the logical approach would be comparing your page’s CTR vs expected CTR for the position it is being shown in and then ranking it lower if your site was underperforming.
Your site does not seem to have that problem or else it would not be able to sustain that position, another site with better CTR Over Expectation would move up the ranks.
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you should keep the page because it’s a sign of good health that you are ranking 1-2 and getting alot of impressions is also a sign of good health, just my opinion. also search term by query in GSC is not always credited right. if you look at the page under GSC and check its click data its much higher, but even then analytics will be higher for that page yet. GSC isn’t that accurate and you are getting more traffic than you think.
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