Case study · Client site, anonymised
Technical SEO for a certification website that was not ranking: 13 to 1,602 clicks
Next to no search traffic, then a climb that carried on after the contract: 13 to 1,602 clicks across matching four-month periods.
13 → 1,602
Clicks, August to November 2025 vs June to September 2026 (122 days each)
885 → 178,538
Impressions a month, August 2025 vs August 2026
458
Clicks in August 2026, five months after we finished, its best month so far
The starting point
One of six certification and training websites run by a US education group, each on its own domain and built on Squarespace and Thinkific. We were hired through Upwork. This one sells project management certificates and was the smallest of the six.
It hardly appeared in Google: 13 clicks in four months. The audit tool flagged more than 50,000 issues across the group, and the pages did not match what buyers search for.
What we did
- Cleared the 50,000+ issues flagged by the client's audit tool across all six websites and their subdomains.
- Researched keywords and competitors for each website, then rewrote titles, headings and copy around the searches that matter.
- Mapped internal links across the group and planned new ones from the strongest pages.
- Reworked the site structure of two of the six websites in a follow-on contract (3 February to 31 March 2026).
The numbers
| Period | Dates | Clicks | Impressions | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | 1 August to 30 November 2025 | 13 | 1,505 | 40.1 |
| After the contract | 1 June to 30 September 2026 | 1,602 | 603,310 | 13.9 |
Source: Google Search Console, web search, sums of daily figures, read 1 November 2026. Contract: 14 January to 31 March 2026.
Search Console
How to read the chart.
The chart at the top of this page is a screenshot of the Search Console Performance report, cropped so the domain does not show. Nothing else is edited.
- Blue line: clicks from Google search each day.
- Purple line: impressions, the number of times the site appeared in results.
- Average position: where the site appeared on average, across every search it showed for. Lower is better. The number can get bigger while traffic grows, because the site starts appearing for more, and harder, searches.
What the numbers do not prove
The numbers are small in absolute terms: 13 clicks a day is a lot for a small website and very little for a big one. The climb began in December 2025, just before we started, and Search Console cannot show which part of the work mattered most. The strongest sign it was the work: the climb kept going after the contract ended.
What we would do differently
Track a fixed set of keywords from day one, so the report can show which searches moved first rather than only total clicks.
“Amazing to work with very fast will be utilizing again for future tasks across 6 domains got 2 domains that were not ranking for over a year to rank. We've worked with over 30 different SEO specialists over the past decade and he is in the top percentile”
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