Episode 5: The Goal, and How We Will Know We Are Winning

The goal is one number. 100 US clicks in a single week, reached before the 12 weeks run out. The strip above this line is where we stand right now. Zero.

Let me explain why that specific number, and how you and I will actually tell if this is working before the clicks show up.

Why US clicks, and not something softer

I could have picked a metric that always goes up and to the right. Total impressions. Pages published. “Reach.” Vanity numbers that let you claim progress while nothing real happens.

US clicks is the opposite. It is a person in the market we care about, typing a buyer query into Google, seeing us, and choosing to click. It is the closest free metric to money on the table. It is also unforgiving, which is the point.

The gap, stated plainly

Right now that number is zero, on 779 US impressions in the week and an average position around 40. So Google shows us to people, and they scroll right past, because we are on page 4.

Getting to 100 clicks a week does not require 100x more impressions. We already have the impressions. It requires a chunk of our pages to move from page 4 into the top handful of results, where clicks actually happen. That is a ranking move, not a volume move.

The leading indicators, because clicks lag

Here is the thing nobody tells you about this kind of climb. Clicks are the last thing to move, not the first. If I only watched clicks, I would think nothing was working for weeks, right up until it suddenly was.

So the real scoreboard has more than one row, and I will report all of it every Monday:

1. Average position. If our money pages drift from 40 toward 15, then toward 10, the clicks are coming even if they are not here yet.
2. Pages in the top 10. The count of our pages that have crossed onto page 1 for a real query.
3. Impressions on buyer terms. Rising impressions on commercial searches means Google is testing us higher.
4. US clicks. The lagging one. The goal. Zero today.

What this looks like if it works, and if it does not

If the plan is right, you will watch positions fall first, then top-10 counts tick up, then impressions on the good terms rise, and only then clicks start to move, probably slowly, then less slowly.

If the plan is wrong, positions will stay stuck around 40 no matter what we ship, and I will have to tell you that, and change the approach in public.

Either way, the numbers on this page are pulled straight from Search Console, and they do not get to lie. Week 1 starts now. See you Monday.