On 7 August I rewrote six page titles.
The reason looked solid. Six searches had my site on page one of Google, some of them at the very top, and none of them had ever produced a single click. That is the classic shape of a title problem: you are being shown to people and they are choosing somebody else, so you rewrite the line they see and you earn the click.
Yesterday I measured what twenty-eight days of those rewrites had done. Zero clicks before. Zero clicks after. The positions held or improved slightly, which rules out the other easy story.
So the titles were never the problem, and I want to tell you what was, because if you run a local business this is almost certainly happening to you too.
Nineteenth-century Paris had a man at the opera whose job was to hire the applause.
They were called the claque — professional clappers, seated through the house, paid to be enthusiastic in the right places. The point of them was not the noise. It was that a room which sounds full of admirers is very hard to argue with, especially from the stage.
My best-performing search is my own trade in my own town. Since June, Google has put my homepage at position 1.6 for it — first or second, above everything. In ninety days it was shown 333 times and produced no visits whatsoever.
Here is what I found when I stopped looking at the title and looked at the impressions instead.
That search fires on every single day. Not most days: twenty-five days out of twenty-five, without a gap, at a steady handful a day. Real demand for a local service does not behave like that — it clusters, it takes weekends off, it goes quiet in August.
It is 98% desktop, on a site where the ordinary mix is nothing like that.
And the same search pulls up nine different pages of mine at once, the lowest of them sitting past position 90 — nine pages down, where nobody has ever scrolled.
Something is walking the whole of Google’s top hundred for that phrase, every day, writing down where everybody sits. Rank-tracking software. Every agency in town watches that search, because it is the one their clients ask about, and I am one of the names on the list. Google logs each of those visits as one more impression of me.
Page one, three months, and a full house of paid clappers.
I paid for that kind of software myself for the best part of five years. Every check it ran on my behalf was landing in somebody else’s report, the same way theirs are landing in mine.
Now the useful part, because none of this matters unless it changes what you do on Monday.
It matters because a search like that is exactly where the money goes. If your main local term sits on page one and nothing clicks, the obvious next move is to pay somebody to fix what the reader sees: the title, the description, the snippet.
That is real work and it is sold at a real price. On a search made of tracking software it cannot return anything, because there is nobody standing there to click. You get an invoice, a set of improved-looking numbers and no additional customer, and everybody involved has been honest throughout.
Three checks separate an audience from a machine. They take about ten minutes and they cost nothing.
Compare it against a search you know is people. Find your best search — the one that actually brings enquiries — and set it beside the suspect one over the same dates. Mine, across the same twenty-five days: the honest search drew 216 impressions and 15 clicks, and the suspect one drew 113 and nothing at all. Same site, same month, and the suspect search sits higher. Position cannot explain a gap like that. The two are not the same kind of thing.
Look at the days. Add the date column and see whether the search ever goes quiet. People take weekends. Software does not.
Look at the device split, and at how many of your own pages the search touches. This is the one that convinced me. My honest search finds exactly one page, every time, which is what a person does. The suspect one finds nine, down to the bottom of the hundredth result. Nobody has ever gone that deep, and nothing with eyes needs to.
If the answer comes back ordinary, you have bought a clean conscience for ten minutes. If it does not, the correct response is the one I did not take in August: leave it alone. There is nothing to fix on a search with no people in it, and the money you were about to spend on it belongs on the searches where somebody is actually standing.
An impression means Google showed your link to something. It has never meant somebody saw it.
I published that check a week after I rewrote the titles. My own article, on my own site, telling people not to rush at a number like this — written seven days too late to stop me, and then not read by the one person who most needed it.
The whole method is in there if you want it: the ten-minute Search Console check, including the device split that gave this away and the case that taught me to test a theory against the searches that disagree with it, not just the ones that fit.
If you run the checks and the shape of your numbers bothers you, send me what you are seeing and I will tell you what I make of it.
