Most agencies publish SEO advice. Fewer publish their own numbers. We pulled 90 days of Google Search Console for andersoncollaborative.com, from 20 May to 17 August 2026, and this is what it showed.
What did the top-line numbers say?
1,770,478 impressions. 1,222 clicks. An average position of 33.9.
That is a click-through rate of 0.07 percent. Just under two million times, Google put us in front of somebody searching, and 1,222 of them chose us.
We could have written a post about SEO best practice instead. This is more useful, because the shape of that number is extremely common and almost nobody publishes it.
Why is that click-through rate so low?
Context matters here, and we would rather give it to you than let you guess.
In February 2026 we migrated this site from WordPress to Astro, and the migration cost us roughly 58% of our organic traffic. That is a large number and it was our own doing. The months since have been a recovery programme: taxonomy cleanup, schema across the site, content reclamation, and a weekly refresh routine.
It worked. We now sit above the pre-cliff baseline we track against, roughly 989 clicks and 975,000 impressions per 90 days, on both measures. Clicks are up about 24%. Impressions are up about 80%.
Which is exactly the problem this article is about. Impressions recovered far faster than clicks, because the site came back by appearing for a much wider set of queries rather than by ranking higher on the ones that matter.
Where did the impressions come from?
Four pages produced most of them. All four are broad, national, high-competition terms.
| Page | Impressions | Clicks | CTR | Avg position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| National digital marketing agencies list | 223,107 | 44 | 0.02% | 22.3 |
| National growth marketing agencies list | 163,465 | 39 | 0.02% | 35.9 |
| National social media agencies list | 85,498 | 11 | 0.01% | 43.0 |
| Miami marketing agencies list | 42,891 | 53 | 0.12% | 30.4 |
Half a million impressions across those four pages produced 147 clicks.
An impression only confirms the page appeared somewhere in a result set. The instinct is to blame the headline. That is not what happened. At position 22 to 43 you are on page three, four or five, and almost nobody arrives there to read a headline at all. Those impressions are real in the sense that Google logged them. They are not real in the sense that a person saw them.
What was the most useful thing in the data?
The Miami page. It sits at a similar position to the national pages and converts impressions to clicks at roughly six times the rate.
That gap is search intent. Somebody searching for a marketing agency in a specific city is closer to a decision than somebody typing a national category term, and they behave differently when they see a result.
We found the same pattern again in our knowledge base. One glossary article on direct response advertising sits at position 5.4 with a click-through rate of 1.49 percent. That is roughly seventy times the CTR of our biggest national page, from a fraction of the impressions.
Narrow and specific beat broad and impressive, in our own data, decisively.
What did we learn about brand search?
422 of the 1,222 clicks came from people typing our name. Add the variants and it is 37 percent of everything. Those searchers converted at 47.7 percent, because they already knew who we were and were looking for us specifically.
Our homepage and about page together took 55 percent of all clicks on the site.
This reframed how we think about content. The single most reliable source of search traffic we have is people who already decided to look us up. Work that makes more people want to type the name is competing directly with work that tries to rank one place higher on a term with a thousand competitors.
What we changed because of it
- We stopped treating impression growth as progress on its own, and started reading it against clicks every week. Impressions had become an actionable-looking metric that was not one.
- We moved effort toward specific, narrow, high-intent topics and away from broad national category terms we are unlikely to win.
- We started expanding the knowledge base, because per page it earns more clicks than anything else we publish.
- We began separating brand from non-brand queries in every report, ours and our clients’, because blending them flatters the whole picture.
What separates visibility from traffic that matters?
Visibility is being shown. Traffic is being chosen. Our numbers had plenty of the first and very little of the second, and the two moved independently enough that watching only the first would have told us the year was going well.
This is what we mean when we say marketing should not be a black box. A dashboard reporting 1.77 million impressions is accurate and almost useless on its own. The same data read against clicks says something specific and actionable, which is that we are ranking wider rather than better, and that the fix is narrower content rather than more of it. Some of the gap is also zero-click behaviour, where the answer appears in the result and the visit never happens.
Why publish this at all?
Because we ask clients to look honestly at their own numbers, and it would be strange to do that while hiding ours.
If your impressions are climbing and your traffic is not, you are probably ranking wider rather than better. That is worth knowing before you commission another twenty pages targeting terms you sit in the thirties for.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are impressions a vanity metric in SEO?
They can be. An impression only confirms your page appeared somewhere in a result set, including positions almost nobody scrolls to. Impressions rising while clicks stay flat usually means you are ranking wider rather than better.
What is a normal click-through rate from Google?
It depends almost entirely on position. Results on page one behave completely differently from results on page three or four, which is why a site-wide average CTR tells you very little on its own.
Why do broad keywords perform worse than specific ones?
Broad terms carry the most competition and the least intent. Our own data showed a city-specific page converting impressions to clicks at roughly six times the rate of the equivalent national page.
Should you stop targeting high-volume keywords?
Not always, but be honest about the position you can realistically hold. Ranking in the twenties or thirties for a huge term produces impressive impression counts and almost no visitors.