Let’s imagine optimising a site with two service pages.
Page A — The Mirage
- 5,000 visits
- Strong impression growth
- Improving CTR
- Excellent engagement
Page B — The Engine
- 200 visits
- Modest search visibility
- Unremarkable CTR
- Modest engagement
Which page is performing better?
The obvious dashboard answer is Page A.
But let’s add one more piece of information.
Page A attracts people researching something adjacent to what the business sells.
Page B attracts 200 people looking for precisely the service the business wants to grow, and eight become customers.
Now which is performing better?
A metric can describe performance. It cannot define success.
Different Parts of the Journey
Our measurement tools observe different parts of the journey.
Google Search Console might tell us:
Query → Impression → Click → Page
Google Analytics continues with:
Landing → Behaviour → Interaction → Business Event
Both are valuable.
But neither independently tells us:
Was this the right person looking for the right solution, reaching the right page, for a service the business actually wants to sell?
What Job Was This Page Created to Do?
Before judging a page, we need to establish its purpose.
Was it created to:
- Generate an enquiry?
- Establish trust before an enquiry?
- Answer a specific objection?
- Introduce a service?
- Support a commercially important page?
- Help an existing customer?
- Capture early-stage discovery?
A page can contribute to several business objectives, but that doesn’t mean it should ask the visitor to pursue all of them at once.
Multiple contributions don’t require multiple competing purposes.
If we don’t establish a page’s job, we’re evaluating it against whichever metric happens to be available and pretty.
That can create ridiculous conclusions.
A FAQ answering an important pre-sale concern shouldn’t necessarily be judged because it doesn’t generate many direct enquiries.
Likewise, a service page generating enormous informational traffic shouldn’t automatically be celebrated if hardly anyone reaching it is a realistic customer.
From Metrics to Meaning
A useful way to give page-level measurements context is:
Page → Topic → Customer Need → Business Objective
For each page:
Page — What is actually there?
Topic — What does it communicate, and what is it being discovered for?
Customer Need — Why would the intended person need this page?
Business Objective — What useful outcome should that relationship eventually contribute towards?
Then measurements acquire context.
Instead of: CTR = 2.4%. Improve it.
We ask: CTR = 2.4%. For what queries, from which audience expectation, towards what page purpose and business outcome?
Same metric.
Very different optimisation question.
A page doesn’t have an abstract “user”.
It has an intended audience.
Traffic becomes meaningful when we understand how closely those visitors resemble the people the business actually exists to help.
The Same Metrics Can Tell Very Different Stories
High impressions + low CTR
Maybe the search proposition is weak
Maybe search engines are exposing the page for the wrong queries.
High CTR + weak engagement
Maybe the search promise and landing experience don’t match.
Strong engagement + few enquiries
Maybe the page is informational by nature.
Or maybe the next step is unclear.
Low traffic + strong business outcomes
Maybe nothing is wrong at all.
Traffic rising + lead quality falling
Perhaps visibility improved while business alignment deteriorated.
Same metrics.
Completely different diagnoses depending on context.
Define “Well” Before Trying to Improve It
Don’t ask whether a page is performing well until you’ve defined what “well” means for that page.
Search Console and similar tools can tell us how a page performs in search.
Analytics can tell us what happens after people arrive.
But the business still has to tell us who should arrive, why the page exists and what a successful outcome actually looks like.
Measurement becomes useful when page performance is connected to purpose.
So before asking: “How can we improve this metric?”
Perhaps the better first question is: “What does success actually mean for this page?”
But that leaves one final problem.
What happens when improving one page makes the wider system worse?
We’ll conclude our little “Zen: The Art of Optimisation” trilogy with that question next.
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