This year was dominated by our work on SEO, PageSpeed and multilingualism. Many agencies consider themselves to be particularly competent in these areas. But how can you really communicate convincingly and credibly that these core competencies actually exist?
Four months ago, I came across a post by Nathan Gotch on LinkedIn that made a lasting impression on me. I copied the content to keep reminding myself what really matters: recent results = real SEO expertise.
Nathan Gotch is absolutely right: it doesn't matter if you have X years of experience, speak at conferences, write books or have hundreds of thousands of followers. Even memorizing all the Google patents won't interest anyone if you're not able to make constant progress in the rankings.
That's why I want to share a few charts from our own projects and our clients' projects. This data is from today (!) and covers the period of time that can be recorded so far. These are the freshest figures, not selected periods when things were going well, whereas today they may look different.
Ready for some real SEO expertise? Here we go!
1st customer project e-commerce: + 35 percent clicks
We compare the last three months with the same period last year in order to exclude seasonal fluctuations and obtain an unbiased result.
The curve is clearly pointing upwards: As a result, 35% more clicks were generated. In addition, the overall development this year enabled double-digit sales growth compared to the previous year according to store statistics.
The budget for the SEO measures has so far been in the lower five-figure range, and the support is being continued on an ongoing basis.
2nd e-commerce customer project: + 260 percent clicks
This customer project also involves an online store, which we optimized in several targeted SEO sprints. The support here is not ongoing, but sprint-based.
The clicks were at a low level last year, with a seasonal boost only noticeable before Christmas. Thanks to the SEO measures implemented, however, visibility increased significantly and the client now achieves numerous top positions on Google in its segment.
An interesting observation from customer project 1 and customer project 2: although the average ranking has improved, the click-through rate has either remained the same or even fallen. This shows that even with very good rankings, the click-through rate often remains soberingly low. The reason lies in the search habits of users: many already click on Google Shopping or the product snippet before they even reach the organic search results.
3rd customer project corporate website: Patient is alive, pulse is back
It is not always possible to achieve enormous increases in visibility, and not for every project. A good example of this is this project from the HR sector, which operates in an extremely competitive market. When we started the relaunch, the project was basically already dead in the water. But it is precisely challenges like these that make it so appealing to achieve sustainable results through targeted SEO measures.
At least we can say that the patient is alive again and has a noticeable pulse. The clicks are still at a very low level, but the SEO work is continuing. The aim is to achieve a significantly higher level of visibility in the first quarter of 2025.
Image SEO: thousands of clicks per day are possible
The chart shows impressively how clicks on Google images have increased ninefold in just eleven months. The reason for this was the switch to the modern AVIF image format, which offers clear advantages from an SEO perspective. In addition, the increase was achieved by publishing new pages on the website, which were specifically optimized and provided with suitable images. This strategic combination of technical adjustments, expanded content and visually appealing elements has sustainably increased visibility and traffic. Clear proof of how technical and content measures can work together.
Another image sprint at the end of November, in which we optimized image metadata such as file names and alt texts, resulted in exponential growth in clicks. These targeted measures significantly increased the findability of the images in the search results.
International SEO: From 0 to over 15,000 clicks per day
Since the introduction of multilingualism in the spring, user interaction on the non-German pages has risen steadily. The chart (which excludes German-language pages) shows the impressive development of the number of clicks, which reached over 15,000 per day in peak weeks.
The peak observed in August was abruptly interrupted by the Google Core Update in mid-August. This update marked the beginning of a phase of moderate declines that lasted until November. The subsequent core update in November then triggered a new phase of growth.
Timeliness of the references
Two months ago, sometime between mid and late October, I saw the following post on Linkedin, where the increase in clicks was celebrated and acknowledged by many others with appreciative comments.
The chart shows exactly the same outlier at the end of July as in our chart one image higher. Although the article was published in October, the author does not show what happened after the core update in mid-August. Her screenshot only shows the values right up to the core update. My question in the comment also remained unanswered, although I was genuinely interested. The author of the article has over 30,000 followers on Linkedin and this chart has already been used as a case study in three posts. But only incompletely until mid-August, the time of Google's core update.
What happened to the chart after that ... you can guess. It is reasonable to assume that this website was also negatively affected by Google after the update. However, this doesn't quite fit in with the cheering post and is therefore better left unmentioned and unshown.
Another comment caught my attention due to the pithy appearance of the self-proclaimed SEO expert. To the right, I have placed the current Sistrix charts of the two referenced projects.
Here, too, it becomes clear that time-based extracts from charts should be treated with caution. The author was initially right with his first quarterly position in Sistrix. However, the success was very short-lived because Google quickly recognized the AI spam as such and immediately downranked both pages again.
A third example, also picked up in my SEO bubble on Linkedin, is also worth noting. Here, the author pointed out that the person on the right - an SEO consultant with over 20,000 followers - had stolen his chart to use it in her own success stories.
This is exactly why Nathan Gotch's statement is confirmed: the actual numbers are the only ones that count. Otherwise, as a customer, you run the risk of being taken in by incomplete, out-of-date or unauthorized evidence of supposed SEO successes.
The SEO market is fast-moving, complex and characterized by constant change. That's why only one thing counts: transparent, up-to-date and well-founded references. Success stories that are merely snapshots or remain incomplete can be deceptive.
If you are looking for professional SEO consulting, make sure that you work with partners who disclose how they react to challenges such as algorithm updates and who communicate their successes honestly and comprehensibly. Because sustainable SEO is not a question of short-term outliers, but of continuous optimization, well-founded decisions and the will to achieve the best possible results even in dynamic environments.
The current figures from our projects show exactly that: real, comprehensible SEO expertise that works in the long term. Get in touch with us today for your project!