Found for more than its own name. 580% more keywords on page one.
This US provider of managed IT, cybersecurity and AI enablement was turning up on Google mostly when people typed its name. I lined up two equal three-month windows, late 2025 and summer 2026. Between them, the number of keywords reaching page one rose about 580%, top-three keywords grew roughly 600% and the average ranking climbed two full pages, from the fifth to the third.
Results
Keywords on page one
Google impressions
Ranked for the brand, buried for the services
Between October and December 2025, the site's average Google position hovered around 43. That is page five, where almost nobody scrolls. Of the clicks earned through page-one keywords, nearly every one came from people searching for the company by name, under two different spellings.
The searches an IT provider actually lives on sat far lower. A local query for an IT company in its home city averaged position 34, and the matching cybersecurity services query averaged 21. Only 14 keywords held a top-three spot across those three months.
What I can and cannot tie to the change
The records I hold for this account are an onboarding questionnaire from August 2026 plus a late-September audit of internal links. Neither is a dated task log covering the two windows, so I am not crediting the shift to any single piece of work.
- 01
Set a fair comparison
I chose two three-month windows of equal length, Q4 2025 and Q3 2026, and set them side by side, so each figure compares like with like rather than a quiet month against a busy one.
- 02
Capture the brief
At onboarding the client set out three service lines: AI enablement, cybersecurity and day-to-day managed IT. Its priority sectors are nonprofits, healthcare and financial services, its stated aim is a dependable flow of prospect leads every month, and the channel it cares about most is AI chat, along with Google's AI Overviews.
- 03
Audit the internal links
In late September 2026 I ran an internal linking audit. It produced just over two hundred tasks for the site's designers, about eighty of them top priority, and turned up more than two dozen orphan pages that nothing linked to, plus four links pointing at broken targets.
- 04
Flag the near-duplicates
The same audit marked a set of city and service pages that were close copies of each other for consolidation and redirects. That work lands after the measured window, so none of the figures here reflect it. It is where I would look next for gains on the service searches.
A broader first page, measured fairly
Across the summer 2026 window, about 580% more keywords held an average position on page one than in late 2025, and the top three grew roughly 600%. Page one is where a business gets noticed; most of the clicking happens in the top three, so the second figure carries more weight.
Impressions per three-month window rose about 240%, from roughly 37,000 to around 130,000, and clicks rose by about half. Most of the new page-one keywords sit in positions four to ten rather than the top three, which helps explain why clicks moved more slowly than visibility.
Other case studies
Want a result like this for your site?
A 30-minute call, no pitch deck. Tell me where you are stuck and I will tell you honestly whether I can help - and if I cannot, who can.