When the description reads well but the clicks aren’t coming, the cause is almost always something the text itself can’t show you, so work through the suspects one by one instead of rewriting it blind. The fix lives in what the line can’t reveal at a glance, not in the wording you are staring at.
Start with what searchers actually see. Google overwrites most descriptions, so the polished line in your CMS may have been swapped for an auto-generated snippet in the live results. The first check is to look at the real search page and Search Console, not your editor, because high impressions plus low clicks on a decent ranking usually points to a snippet you didn’t write. Second, the description never works alone; it sits under the title. If the title is weak, rewritten, or pulling in a different direction, the pair fails even when the description is strong on its own. Third, it may be working too well in the wrong way: if it answers the query so completely, or sits under an AI Overview that already answered it, the searcher has no reason left to click, and a line that states everything up front can remove the click it was meant to earn. Fourth, it may read cleanly but speak to the wrong intent, informational phrasing on a buying query, or missing the location or modifier the searcher actually cares about.
Position matters too. A fine snippet at rank five still bleeds clicks to a sharper one above it, or to a competitor showing star ratings and rich results that catch the eye first.
Take the low-CTR page and walk it through that list before touching a word: is Google rewriting it, is the title undercutting it, is the answer already given, is the intent off, is something above it winning the eye. The wording is the last thing to change, not the first.