CASCase study
Turning a ranking into a click: local search for a small business
A Texas-style barbecue restaurant and caterer in Normandy. Fast site, solid customer reviews, and yet search traffic that did not follow.
The constraint The budget of an independent business. No paid campaigns, no bought links: everything had to come from what the site could earn on its own.
How it ran
- Pull Search Console before writing a single line, to target measured queries rather than guessed ones.
- Find the opportunity where it actually is: local queries already ranking 6 to 8, with a zero click-through rate.
- Fix a technical fault invisible from the repository: the www subdomain returned a 200 instead of redirecting, duplicating pages in the index.
- Write 10 articles targeting exactly the queries measured, each with its volume and starting position.
- Hold performance: stylesheets inlined, render blocking brought from 430 ms to zero, mobile score between 97 and 100.
- Structured data and local information consistency kept up to date, reviews included.
Outcome
- 162 clicks for 7,685 impressions over 90 days, the brand ranking at 1.3.
- The opportunity identified and quantified: three local queries ranking 6 to 8, 454 combined impressions at a zero click-through rate.
- Duplicate pages removed from the index after fixing the redirect, verified in production.
- Mobile performance score between 97 and 100, render blocking eliminated.
What I take from itA ranking of 6 to 8 with no clicks is worth more than a ranking of 40: the distance to cover is short and known. The opportunity is not in the queries you wish you had, it is in the ones you already half own.