Where they started
This is a short-term lending website operating in the Australian market. Before we started, we had 90 days of measured data to work from, a solid baseline with data for the full period: clicks averaged 3.19 a day, sessions 6.63 a day, and impressions worked out to roughly 186 a day. The average position across tracked keywords sat at 66.6, well outside any range likely to draw clicks. With 755 keywords being tracked and 76 pages in scope, the picture was a site that search engines were aware of but rarely surfaced.
The scale of the technical backlog was part of the story too. At the point we started, the platform had identified 139 open issues across the site. That’s the kind of number that explains a weak average position better than any single page does: not one big problem, but many small ones spread across the site.
The plan for the first month was straightforward: start clearing the highest-value issues, get structural fixes (schema) and on-page targeting (meta) into production, and begin tracking how the tracked keyword set moved once those changes landed.
What we did in this first 30-day window (22 July to 20 August):
- Proposed 160 changes across the site
- Applied 50 of those, split between meta changes (35) and schema changes (15)
- Verified 36 of the applied changes as live and correct
- No content pieces were published or in flight this month, the work here was structural rather than editorial
Of the 139 open issues, 9 resolved during the window, but the platform can only claim credit for issues it directly fixed, and that figure is currently zero, so we’re not attributing those 9 to this work yet.
On the numbers that matter most, the picture is mixed, as is normal this early. Clicks per day sat at 3.17, essentially flat against the 3.19 baseline, not a rise. Sessions per day rose from 6.63 to 7.8. Impressions per day rose more clearly, from around 186 to about 292, which suggests pages are being shown more often without yet being chosen more often.
Average position across all tracked keywords moved from 66.6 to 69.5, which is worse, not better. But narrowing to the 165 keywords we could compare directly between the two periods, 100 improved and 55 declined, for a mean gain of 2.2 positions among that group. Rankings moving in different directions depending on which set you look at, with clicks not yet following either way, is where this site stands after one month. The next chapter will tell us whether the applied changes start turning that mixed signal into consistent movement.