Thirteen Client Sites: How Many Actually Improved?

First, three words you need

SEO reports are full of words that hide what happened. There are only three you need to read this page, so here they are in plain English.

• An impression means Google showed your business to somebody. They searched for something, and your page was on the list. They may not have even looked at it
• A ranking is where you sit on that list. Page one, near the top, is where people actually look. Page three may as well not exist
• A click is a real person choosing your business and going to your website. One human being, who needed something you sell, who picked you

Those three things are not equal, and the difference matters more than anything else on this page.

Why we care most about clicks

Impressions are easy to grow. Get your site listed for a few thousand more searches and the number jumps, even if nobody cares. A report full of impressions can look wonderful while your phone stays quiet.

A click is different. A click is somebody typing what they need, seeing a list of businesses, and choosing yours. That person did not know your name. They found you because you were there when they went looking.

That is the whole point of this work. Not to be seen. To be picked.

A click can become a phone call, and a phone call can become a job. An impression cannot become anything. So when we judge our own work, clicks are the number we look at first - and clicks are the number we lead with below, even when a different one would make us look better.

One more thing about how we counted

We did not count people who searched for the business by name.

If somebody types "Smith Plumbing" into Google, they already know Smith Plumbing. They saw the truck, or a friend told them. We did not do that. Counting those people would let us take credit for work we did not do.

So every number on this page is only from people who searched for a service - things like "gutter cleaning near me" - and found the business that way. Strangers. That makes our numbers smaller, and it makes them real.

What happened, in short

Thirteen accounts. Here is how they came out:

• Twelve of thirteen got more clicks
• Thirteen of thirteen showed up on page one for more searches than before
• Seven of thirteen got more impressions
• Four of thirteen at least doubled their clicks
• One of thirteen ended with fewer clicks than it started with

• 12 of 13 got more clicks real people who searched and picked them
• 13 of 13 reached page one more often for more searches than before
• 7 of 13 were shown more often impressions - the weakest of the three

We worked on most of these for about four months. A few ran longer, one only a month. Four months is a short time in this work, and that shapes everything you are about to read.

How much time these businesses actually got

This is the part that explains everything below, and most agencies would leave it out.

Twelve of these thirteen businesses were paid for about 35 minutes of SEO work a month. Not a typo. Over four months that is roughly two and a half hours of work on the whole website.

The thirteenth, a roofing contractor, gets six hours a month. That is about twenty-five times as much attention.

So when you read the numbers below, read them next to the time. Twelve businesses got a couple of hours each. One got a real budget. They did not get the same result, and they were never going to.

The twelve that got 35 minutes a month

Each line shows one business. The first dot is where it started. The second dot is where it finished. The further apart they sit, the more it grew.

We compared each one against the same months a year earlier - April through July this year against April through July last year, for example. Some of these trades are busy in summer and quiet in winter, and comparing summer to summer stops the seasons taking credit for the work.

A few of those bars are very short, and that is the honest picture of two hours of work. The electrical contractor went from 17 clicks to 48. That is a small number and a big change at the same time - nearly three times as many strangers finding the business, bought with about two hours of somebody's attention.

The law firm at the top had never appeared in Google search before we started, so there was nothing to compare it against. That is why it has no percentage anywhere on this page.

The one that got six hours a month

The roofing contractor is our own client rather than a hand-me-down, and the budget is a real one. Nine months at six hours a month.

• 651 to 1,284 clicks a year nearly double
• 437 to 2,729 page-one searches more than six times as many
• 6 hours of work every month against 35 minutes for the rest

We also rebuilt this website, so this one is not purely SEO on an existing site, and we would rather say that than let you assume otherwise.

The point of putting it beside the other twelve is not to brag. It is to show what the difference in time actually buys. The same people did both.

All thirteen together

Added up, the thirteen went from 997 clicks a year to 1,993. Page-one searches went from 3,361 to 12,900.

The one that went backwards

The CPA firm was a normal job that did not deliver. Four months, the same work we did everywhere else, and it ended the period with nine clicks instead of ten.

It did show up on page one for more searches than before - 84 instead of 54. But none of that turned into visits.

We do not know why. It might be the industry. When somebody searches for an accountant, Google fills the page with big national software companies and directory sites, and a small local firm has a much harder climb than a gutter installer does. It might be that four months was not long enough. We are not going to invent a better reason.

It is on this page because a results page with no failures in it is not a results page. If you are deciding whether to hire us, that one line tells you more than the roofing one does.

Why rankings move before clicks do

Look at the auto body shop. Clicks barely moved, from 119 to 125. But page-one searches went from 440 to 959, more than double.

That happens a lot, and it is worth understanding. When a site starts doing better, it first shows up on page one for a lot more searches - but usually near the bottom of that page. Being tenth on page one gets you very few clicks. Being third gets you a lot. So the rankings climb first, and the visits come later, as those positions keep improving.

That is why all thirteen gained page-one searches, twelve gained clicks, and only seven gained impressions. Different parts of the same process, moving at different speeds.

If somebody promises you a flood of traffic in four months, this gap is why you should be careful. What a few months reliably moves is where you rank. The visits follow if the work keeps going.

What we actually changed

Most of these sites came to us with an SEO plugin already installed and nothing done with it. Yoast, All in One SEO, Rank Math - the brand did not matter. A plugin is not the work. It is a set of blank boxes, waiting for somebody to fill them in, and nobody had.

• We filled in the page information the plugin had been asking for
• We wrote the code that tells Google what the business is, what it sells, and when it is open - all of it was empty
• We fixed the headings on each page so both people and Google could follow them
• We fixed service lists that did not match what the business actually sold

On most of these we did not add a single new page. We were hired for SEO, not to build websites, so the sites stayed as they were.

That is worth knowing if you have an SEO plugin and assume it is handling things. Installing it is the easy part. Somebody still has to do the work.

What is not on this page

We set six other accounts aside, because something other than our work moved their numbers.

Two were a tree service and a roofer. The year we were comparing against included cleanup work after a hurricane, which gave every business like them a huge, temporary spike. Comparing a normal year to that year would make us look bad for no good reason - and comparing the other direction would make us look good for no good reason.

One switched web companies partway through, and the new company rebuilt the site. One was stuck on a website system that would not let us make most of the changes. One never got much work done before the job ended. One had circumstances that made it a poor comparison.

We are telling you they exist because quietly leaving accounts out is the easiest way to make a page like this look better than it should.

How to check your own site

If you pay somebody for SEO and cannot tell whether it is working, four things will tell you more than any report will. None of them require you to confront anybody.

• Open your SEO plugin and look at what it is already flagging in red. Then ask your provider why those things are still red
• Read your page titles one after another. If they are all the same shape with your business name stuck on the end, nobody wrote them - a setting did
• Search for your business and look for the extras: star ratings, common questions, opening hours. If none of that ever appears, the code that feeds it is probably empty
• Read your list of services like a stranger would. If it does not match what you actually sell, nothing else will fix that

If those four look right, whoever you have is doing the work.

If you want us to look at yours

Send us your web address. We will run our real tools on it and send you what we find. We will not contact your current provider, we will not publish it or name you, and you are free to do nothing at all with the report.

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