Find the search where you rank fine and nobody clicks

When traffic is flat, the instinct is to write another page. Usually the cheaper win is sitting in the report you already have.

Our own diagnosis came out this way. The problem was never that nothing ranked. Things ranked and were not being clicked, which is a completely different problem with a completely different fix.

Pull the list

1. Search Console, Performance, last three months. Turn on the CTR and Position columns — they are off by default.
2. Sort by impressions, descending.
3. Read down for rows with a lot of impressions and a click-through rate near zero.
4. Split them by position. Under about position ten, the title is the problem. Past position twenty, the ranking is the problem and the title will not save it.

Rough calibration for the top ten: the first result takes roughly a quarter to a third of clicks, and it falls off steeply from there, into low single digits by the bottom of the page. You do not need exact figures. You need to notice the row sitting at position four with a rate that belongs at position fifteen.

Then go look at yourself in the results

What they see now

What the same page could say

Open a private window, search the phrase, and read your result next to the ones above and below it. This is the single most useful thing in this post and almost nobody does it. You are looking at the shelf your customer is looking at.

Three things go wrong there, in order of how often we see them:

• The title does not contain the words they typed. People scan for their own phrase. A title that paraphrases it looks like a different subject.
• The title is your company name first. Nobody searching for a service is looking for your company name. Put the thing, then the qualifier, then you.
• The description is a mission statement. It is not a ranking factor and it is entirely an advertisement. Put the specific in it: the price, the turnaround, the neighbourhood, the guarantee.

Google will rewrite about half of your titles anyway

Which is not a reason to skip this. It rewrites the vague ones, using text it finds on the page. A title that is concrete, matches the query, and fits in roughly sixty characters is the kind it tends to leave alone.

Change one thing at a time and give it two to three weeks. If the click-through rate moves and the position does not, the title was the problem and you just recovered traffic you had already earned.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

A page at position four with a thousand monthly impressions and a one percent click rate is getting ten visits. At a normal rate for that position it would get seventy or eighty. Those sixty visits are not hypothetical future traffic from content you have not written. They were shown your name this month, and they clicked somebody else.