Case study
A London chartered surveying practice with over 150 pages of genuinely expert material — and almost no search traffic to show for it. Six months of steady work took it from around six clicks a day to over twenty.
This is a common shape of problem, and it rarely looks like a problem from the inside. The practice had been publishing for years. The writing was good — technical, accurate, the kind of thing only someone who does the work could produce. The site looked fine. Nothing was obviously broken.
But it was earning roughly six visits a day from Google, and the average page sat at position 22 — the middle of page three, where nobody goes. The site was appearing in front of searchers constantly and almost never being clicked, because appearing on page three is functionally the same as not appearing at all.
Nobody had done anything wrong. The site had simply drifted: published without a plan, never revisited, never tidied, never optimised. Years of small neglect compound quietly until the whole thing underperforms.
No relaunch, no rebuild, no dramatic gesture. Monthly work, across four fronts, for six months:
Monthly clicks from Google search
Traffic starts climbing within a month of the work beginning, and doesn’t stop.
| Month | Clicks | Avg. position |
|---|
Traffic roughly tripled, but the more telling detail is when. Clicks had sat between 122 and 205 a month for the whole preceding period, with no trend in either direction. The engagement began in February, which immediately edged above the top of that range — and from March onwards it isn’t close. Every month of the engagement has beaten every month before it.
Average ranking position
The site moved off page three and onto page two. Axis is inverted, so up is better.
This is worth being precise about, because average position is the metric most often quoted misleadingly. A site that ranks for 200 terms and one that ranks for 20,000 are not comparable on an average. Over this period the practice's search footprint expanded substantially, so the average position number understates the improvement rather than flattering it.
Where the new traffic comes from
Clicks earned by articles published during the engagement.
A quarter of the site's search traffic didn't exist six months ago.
The top performer — a guide to a specific statutory rent-increase form — was published in May and reached page one within weeks. It now earns more search traffic than most of the site's long-established pages.
Crucially, almost none of this is brand traffic. Searches for the practice by name account for about 9% of clicks. The other 91% are people with a problem and no idea who the practice is — which is the only kind of traffic that grows a business.
The largest opportunity on this site is still untouched. The site’s right-to-light and daylight pages are shown to searchers over 220,000 times a month and convert 0.02% of it — roughly 43 clicks. Not because the pages are bad, but because they sit between positions 16 and 30: visible to Google, invisible to humans.
Getting those pages onto page one is the next phase, and it's a bigger prize than everything achieved so far. The demand is already proven; the site simply isn't ranked highly enough to collect it yet.
All figures taken directly from Google Search Console, comparing the 12 months to August 2026. The engagement began in February 2026. Client anonymised at their request.