Common failures
Where this usually goes wrong
The three we are called in to fix most often. If any of these describe your current setup, that is the first thing we would change.
Measurement
How you will know it is working
Agreed before we start, so progress is visible in the months before it shows up in revenue.
- Click-through rate by page
- The fastest-moving on-page metric. A rewritten title shows up in Search Console CTR within days of the recrawl, independent of any ranking change.
- Weeks 1–3
- Cannibalising pairs
- The count of queries where two of your URLs both rank. It should fall to near zero as pages are consolidated.
- Weeks 2–6
- Average position, target terms
- Movement from 30 to 15 produces no traffic and is real progress. Tracking it is what stops the work looking like it failed in month two.
- Weeks 4–12