A services firm's site sells a conversation, not a product. It has a handful of service pages, some case studies, a team page and a blog that was enthusiastic in its first year. The searches that reach it are specific — 'fractional CFO for SaaS', 'employment law firm Manchester' — and low in volume, which means a single well-made page can own one and a poorly-made one can lose it entirely.
Because the volume is low and each lead is worth a great deal, the temptation is to judge SEO by leads. Leads are the right thing to want and the wrong thing to measure a page change by: a month's leads on a services site is a small number moved by everything. Impressions and click-through rate on the service pages are what a change can visibly alter, and they move weeks before the lead count could.
Increasingly the stranger asks an assistant first. 'Who does X for companies like mine' is a question ChatGPT and Perplexity answer with a shortlist, and a services firm that is not on it never gets the search click at all.
The findings that recur on this kind of site
- Service pages that describe the discipline, not the offerA page about what accounting is rather than what you do for whom. It reads as thin content to a crawler and as generic to a buyer, and it is the most common finding on a firm's site.
- Case studies with the client's name as the title'Acme Corp' as a title tells nobody what the work was. Titles that are too short or that duplicate the client page, on the pages that are your proof.
- A blog archive that has gone quiet and staleSixty posts from three years ago, half of them thin, still linked from the nav, spending the crawler's attention on the least current thing you have.
- Team pages with no outgoing linksEach partner's page a dead end, when it should be the page that links the services that person actually delivers.
- Missing Organization structured dataNo schema saying what the firm is, where it is and what it does, on a site where the entity is the entire product.
What to change first, and what to compare it against
- Rewrite the service pages before touching anything elseThey carry the impressions and they are the pages a buyer reads. Everything else on the list ranks below them by impressions, usually by a wide margin.
- Judge by CTR and impressions on the service queriesNot by leads. A title and description rewrite shows in click-through rate within the window; a lead shows up when the buyer's quarter starts, which is nothing to do with you.
- Use the untouched service pages as the controlRewrite three of six, leave three. Same window, same control-set discipline as any other site. If you have too few pages for that, record the fix as landed and say plainly that the comparison is weak.
- Ask the shortlist questions monthlyWhether an assistant names you for 'firms that do X' is a rate over months, and who it names instead is the competitor list you would pay for.
Questions from people running one
Our traffic is tiny. Can anything be measured?
Some things. Click-through rate on a page with a few hundred impressions a month moves visibly when the title changes. Position on a specific query moves visibly. Leads do not, at that volume, and any tool claiming to attribute a lead to an SEO change on forty visits a day is guessing. Expect some fixes to come back with no clean verdict; that is the honest outcome at this size.
Should we keep publishing on the blog?
Only if each post answers a question a buyer asks before booking a call. A post that does is a service page in disguise and worth writing; one that does not is a thin page competing with the ones that matter. Prune the archive first, then publish rarely and well.
Everything above is the method, usable with any crawler and a Search Console export. Rankelle runs it on a schedule: the crawl, the grouping into causes, the watch for the fix landing, the frozen control set and the verdict four weeks on — including the verdicts that say the work did nothing. One site is free, permanently, because the first verdict takes six weeks to arrive.
Try it on your own site, free
The whole audit of every website you add, no card and no expiry. Pay only when you want the proof.