Why Your Website Sits on Page Two, and What Actually Moves It

Most businesses I speak to assume they are invisible in Google. Usually they are not. They are on page two, which earns almost exactly the same as being invisible but feels very different when somebody explains it.

A real example, my own site

I will use my own numbers rather than a client’s, because it is more honest and I do not have to anonymise anything.

Over ninety days my site was shown in Google 13,299 times. Of those, 6,535 impressions came from searches where I ranked between positions six and twenty. Clicks from that entire group: one.

Not a low number. One.

Why page two earns nothing

Roughly two thirds of clicks go to the top three results. By position eight or nine you are into low single digit percentages, and past position ten you are into rounding errors. People do not scroll to page two, they change their search instead.

Which means the gap between position fourteen and position four is not a small improvement. It is the difference between nothing and a phone that rings.

The useful thing about it

Sitting on page two is genuinely good news, and here is why. Google has already decided you are relevant. It is showing you to people searching for exactly what you sell. The hard part, being considered at all, is done.

Getting from nowhere to page two is slow work. Getting from page two to page one is a different, smaller job.

How to find out if this is you

Open Google Search Console, go to the performance report and add the average position column. Sort by impressions. If you see rows with hundreds of impressions, almost no clicks and a position between eight and twenty, that is your list. That is where the money is.

If you do not have Search Console set up, that is the actual first job, and it is free.

What usually moves them

In my experience, in this order. A page that properly matches the search, rather than a paragraph buried in a page about something else. Internal links pointing at that page from the rest of the site. Titles that read like an answer instead of a slogan. Speed, if the site is genuinely slow. And for local searches, the Google Business Profile, which carries far more weight than most people expect.

None of that is glamorous. It is the same handful of things every time.

If you want somebody to just tell you which of your pages are sat in that band and what is holding each one back, that is exactly what my £150 audit is. Or read more about how I approach SEO.