Yesterday I posted the ugly version: a hundred and ten daily posts, four thousand impressions, not enough clicks. The scan was the easy part. The hard part is the morning after, when you have to fix what the scan found. That is what to do after an SEO audit, and it is the part almost nobody does.
Today I did four things. None of them took more than an afternoon.
The number-five ranking earning nothing
One page on my site ranks fifth on Google for its subject. Top of the first page, above almost everyone. Over ninety days it earned zero clicks. Not one.
Ranking is there, but the clicks are not. Google was handing me a great search result that most people would pay for, and nobody was biting. When I looked at what the searcher actually sees, it was the description. The grey description line under the blue link was the opening sentence of the blog post: a story about a senior partner at a client asking me a question last month. A fine first line for a reader who has already clicked. A terrible one for a person scanning ten results for an answer.
So I rewrote it. Not the post, just the two lines Google shows: the title and the description. The new description says what the reader gets, plainly, what each option does, what it costs, when to pick which. Two lines. The rest of the page never changed.
The same fix, two more times
Two other posts sit on the first page with thousands of impressions between them and five clicks to show for it. Same disease. Good enough to rank, not good enough to click. I rewrote the title and the description on both to say what the reader walks away with, instead of being clever about it.
Google hides most of the exact searches that reach a page, so I am partly working blind. I cannot tune to a query I cannot see. What I can do is make the promise clearer for everyone who scrolls past, and that lifts the click rate whatever they typed.
I was competing with myself
While I was in there I found something annoying. Two posts, published the same day, on the same topic, almost the same words. Both live. Both indexed by Google. I had shipped the same piece twice under two different web addresses, and the two of them had been quietly splitting the ranking between them for three weeks.
I picked the stronger one, retired the other, and pointed its old address at the keeper so the link still works for anyone who saved it. One good page beats two half-strength copies of it.
Turning on the tracking I should have had
Last one. Two thirds of the people who reach my site show up in my analytics as "direct," which is a polite way of saying the tool has no idea where they came from. If I share a link on LinkedIn and someone clicks it, I want that click to say LinkedIn, not shrug.
The fix is 2013 tactics: add a short tag to the end of every link I post anywhere, so the analytics can sort it. I wrote the tagging down as a rule so I stop forgetting, and tagged today's links before they went out. Now I will actually know whether the writing I do on other people's platforms sends anyone home.
The boring part
The scan makes the story. A number bad enough to confess writes itself. The fixes are dull: two-line rewrites, one redirect, a handful of tagged links, an afternoon of tidying nobody will ever see on the page.
They are also the part most people skip. The audit gets run, the report gets admired, and the list underneath it never gets done. An audit you do not act on is just a tidier way to feel bad about your website. I would rather do the dull afternoon and watch the number move.
Monthly Revenues $11,000 | Clients 2 | Prospects 1 outbound live, Meta and WhatsApp still down
Day 112 of 365.