73% Click Rise Hid a Dying Site: Why One Metric Wasn't Enough

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A developer running a small editorial site fixed a technical SEO issue in June by rendering unique titles and descriptions for each page, replacing a single generic tag used across all 50-odd pages. The change worked as intended: clicks rose 73% and click-through rate improved from 0.47% to 0.56% over the following 28 days. However, a deeper audit revealed that only 10 of roughly 50 pages were earning any search impressions at all, and the same five pages had captured every single click for three consecutive months. The top five pages accounted for 91% of all impressions, meaning the aggregate click metric was effectively measuring just those URLs rather than the site as a whole. Recognising that better descriptions could only help pages already appearing in search results — not the 37 pages that were ignored or never crawled — the developer retired the site entirely.

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