A Tale of Two Click-Through Rates

Today in LocalSEOGuide.com’s GSC profile, I noticed one of those new Recommendations notifications telling us that one of our pages had gotten a lot of impressions recently:

Certainly nice to see.

When I clicked the “Check Page Performance” link, I saw the following very interesting graph:

It’s interesting, to me at least, because it shows how a crappy page can rank well, but can quickly stop ranking well if it doesn’t algorithmically demonstrate that it’s “helpful” to searchers.

Here’s what I think happened:

We put up this “Quick Guide to Google Business Profiles for Enterprise Brands” page a few years ago. It’s not “crappy” per se, but it hasn’t been updated, and it starts out with “What is Google Business Profile?” (I guess our content team AT THAT TIME hadn’t figured out how to tune AI just yet). So not a great start.

For whatever reason, around February 16th, Google decided to rank it on page one for a few decent keywords like “Google business profile logo size”. Here’s a list of some of them:

And the URL got a single click, giving it a 1.7% click-through rate. I guess that performance was good enough that Google decided to test it across a lot more queries, from which it only got a whopping 0.4% CTR. That feedback was probably good enough for Google to decide that our quick guide was not particularly helpful for these queries. And back to oblivion it fell.

The moral of the story: Make sure your awesome content matches the searcher intent.