Thirteen Client Sites: How Many Actually Improved?

Clicks, rankings, impressions: what they actually mean

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.

Impression

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.

Ranking

Where you sit on that list. Page one, near the top, is where people actually look. Page three may as well not exist.

Click

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 clicks matter more than rankings

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 clicks are the number we judge our own work by. They are the number we lead with below, even when a different one would flatter us.

We counted strangers only, not your existing customers

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.

The result: 12 of 13 got more clicks

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.

What 35 minutes of work a month actually buys

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

Twelve of these thirteen businesses were on what we call a touchpoint campaign. That means about 35 minutes of SEO work a month. Not a typo. Over four months it comes to roughly two and a half hours of work on the whole website.

A touchpoint campaign is the smallest amount of attention that still does something. You fix the things that matter most, you keep the site from drifting backwards, and you accept that you are not going to win a hard search this way. It is a floor, not a plan.

The thirteenth, a roofing contractor, gets six hours a month. That is about twenty-five times as much attention, and it is a real campaign rather than a touchpoint one.

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

Twelve businesses at 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 once. Nearly three times as many strangers found the business. It cost 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.

One business at six hours a month: clicks nearly doubled

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 on a touchpoint campaign

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 added up: 997 clicks to 1,993

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

Why 48 clicks can be worth more than 4,800 visitors

Forty-eight clicks does not sound like much. Here is why it can be.

Two kinds of people end up on your website. The first kind was not looking for you. They saw an ad, or a post, or a link, and wandered in. Most of them leave without doing anything.

The second kind typed exactly what they needed into Google. Gutter cleaning near me. Emergency drain unclogging. Roof leak repair. They already have the problem. They are trying to fix it today. And out of a whole page of choices, they picked you.

Almost everything counted on this page is that second kind. We stripped out the people searching for the business by name, so what is left is strangers with a problem, looking for somebody to solve it right now.

That is why the click count is not really the number to judge. The number to judge is what one job is worth to you.

Take your own figure - one roof, one drain, one case, one set of books - and hold it against the numbers above.

Here is that sum with real numbers, using the roofing contractor. They get six hours of work a month and we bill $130 an hour. Over nine months that is 54 hours, or about $7,020 of SEO work.

In that time their clicks went from 651 a year to 1,284. That is 633 more people a year finding them through a search.

Now put a job against it. A new shingle roof is somewhere around $10,000 of revenue. A repair is nearer $2,000. A metal roof can be $20,000, and a commercial job can be a great deal more.

So one new shingle roof pays for all nine months of the work, with money left over. A single metal roof pays for it twice. Four repairs would cover it.

Out of 633 extra people finding them, does one become a roof? That is the question worth asking, and it is the only sum that matters. We are not going to answer it for you with a conversion rate we invented.

We are not going to tell you what your conversion rate is. We do not have one we can stand behind for your business. Our own site has had six clicks since we rebuilt it, which is not a rate, and we do not hold our clients' booking records.

What we can do is show you the range other people publish, and let you work out where your own business sits. That is the next section.

$7,020 of work, $21,000 to $43,000 of revenue in year one

We cannot tell you what this client's conversion rate is. We do not hold their booking records, and we are not going to guess at a number and present it as theirs.

What we can do is take what the industry publishes, apply it to a realistic spread of jobs, and show you the arithmetic. Change any input and the answer changes - that is the point of showing the working.

Lucky Orange puts organic search traffic at 2 to 4 percent. That is the share of people arriving from a search who do something: fill in a form, send a message, ask a question. It is not the share who become paying customers.

A roofing business does not sell one thing, so the value of a job depends on which job it is. For the sake of the example, say the work splits roughly like this:

Repairs, about $2,000 each

Six jobs in ten. The bread and butter.

Shingle replacement, about $10,000

Three jobs in ten.

Metal roof, about $20,000

Around seven in a hundred.

Commercial, about $40,000 and up

Around three in a hundred, and often much larger.

That spread works out at an average job worth about $6,800. Now say one inquiry in four turns into actual work - a modest figure when the person contacting you already has a leaking roof.

Here is what 633 extra clicks a year does with those numbers, against the $7,020 the nine months of work cost.

One roof pays for all nine months

If the table above feels like a lot of assumptions stacked on each other, here is the same point without any of them.

Nine months of work cost $7,020. One shingle roof is about $10,000.

One job pays for all of it. Not one job a month. One job, across the whole nine months, and the rest is profit. Four repairs would do it. Half a metal roof would do it.

Out of 13 to 25 inquiries a year, does one become a roof? That question needs no benchmark, no close rate and no spreadsheet. You already know the answer for your own business.

Lucky Orange: what counts as a good conversion rate →

The account that lost clicks, and why we kept it here

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. Search for an accountant and Google fills the page with big national software companies and directory sites. 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.

Rankings move first, traffic follows months later

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 changed on each site

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.

The six accounts we left out, and why

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.

Would this work for your business?

Local SEO is what we do. Not national campaigns, not enormous online stores. Getting a business found by the people who live near it and need what it sells.

Not every business needs it, and we would rather say so than sell you something that will not pay for itself. Here is how we think about it.

If your business brings in about half a million dollars a year or more, you should almost certainly have some form of SEO running. At that size a couple of extra jobs a month covers the cost several times over, and the work builds on itself instead of stopping the day you stop paying.

That figure is not really about your size. It is about demand. Think about an established business in your trade, in your town. If one of those turns over serious money, that money came from somewhere. People needed the service, went looking, and picked somebody. A share of that choosing happens on Google - made by people who do not know any of the names yet.

If nobody in your trade around here earns much, that is worth hearing. It usually means there is not much local demand, or that the demand is not settled by searching. Neither is something SEO fixes, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a year of it.

If you are a local business, your fight is easier than you think. You are not competing with the whole internet. You are competing with the other businesses in your town, and most of them have done nothing at all. There is real ground sitting there for whoever picks it up first.

And if one of those does not describe you, we have written the other half of this honestly too - who SEO is the wrong spend for, and what we would tell you to do instead.

Is SEO worth it? Sometimes it is not →

Four checks you can run on your own site in ten minutes

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.

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