I run a small site about learning Chinese. Fifty-four pages, all indexed, clean technicals. Last week I pulled 28 days of Search Console data and sat with it for an hour.
The average position was 41.7.
I have read a lot of these posts. Almost none of them show the month where nothing worked. This is that month.
The numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Impressions | 490 |
| Clicks | 8 |
| CTR | 1.63% |
| Average position | 41.7 |
| Queries with any impression | 101 |
And the distribution by position:
| Position | Queries | Impressions | Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 4-10 | 4 | 13 | 0 |
| 11-20 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 21-50 | 2 | 3 | 0 |
| 51+ | 92 | 143 | 0 |
Ninety-two of 101 queries sit past page five.
Finding 1: CTR was never the problem
My first instinct was that my titles were bad. So I checked them. The homepage title was 70 characters with the main keywords. The tones page had a hook in it ("Free Test"). Meta descriptions ran 157 to 163 characters with specific claims.
Then I found the counter-example. One page ranks at position 4.3 and converts 33% of its impressions into clicks. Same writing style, same site, same author.
The difference was position, not copy. At position 41, a 1.63% CTR is roughly what you should expect. Position 1 gets somewhere near 25%, but that number belongs to a different situation.
I had been about to rewrite 54 titles. That would have cost a week and changed nothing.
Finding 2: a third of the traffic was the wrong traffic
I grouped the 101 queries by intent. GSC anonymises a chunk of queries, so the visible ones only account for 162 of the 490 impressions, but the pattern was clear enough.
| Intent | Queries | Impressions | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Looking up a Chinese version of their own name | 38 | 61 | 37.7% |
| Learning Chinese | 23 | 43 | 26.5% |
| Typos and long-tail fragments | 40 | 58 | 35.8% |
The name-lookup group was things like "chinese name translation" and "convert to chinese name". Those people want to see their name in Chinese characters. They are not learning the language, and they will never buy anything a language site sells.
One page on my site gets 23% of all impressions and produces zero conversions. It is the name generator. It is ranking for the right words and attracting the wrong people.
Finding 3: backlinks did not fix position on their own
I have six dofollow backlinks, from three articles I wrote on dev.to. Two pages carry them. Their average position is 58.9.
A page with no backlinks at all sits at 45.0.
That is not a controlled experiment. Different pages, different competition. Still, it stopped me believing that more links alone would move anything.
What I am doing instead
Not rewriting titles. Not adding more words to pages that already answer their question in the first paragraph.
Two things:
First, making each page's opening line something a machine can quote. Comparing my two versions of the same intro:
Before: "Language is just the surface. Culture is what makes you want to explore deeper."
After: "Chinese culture here covers six areas: food, festivals, calligraphy, kung fu, the 24 solar terms and hanfu. Each section ends with six Mandarin words, 36 in all."
The second one can be lifted and used as an answer. The first one cannot. That is the shape I think AI assistants look for when they decide what to quote.
Second, structured data where it was missing. I audited all 54 pages and found 16 with no JSON-LD at all. Not "no FAQ schema", no structured data of any kind. The culture page was one of them: it had been live for months with nothing. That is a mechanical fix, roughly ten minutes a page.
The honest part
None of this is a growth channel. I am fixing things that should have been right the first time. Traffic will stay small until the site earns enough trust to rank. I do not have a shortcut for that.
If you are at position 40 with 17 impressions a day, stop asking how to improve your CTR. Ask why the page is at 40. Most of the time the site has not earned position 10 yet.
The data behind this post comes from the Search Console API on my own site.
Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing.
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