Stuck at the bottom of page one. 130% more clicks by August.
I took on SEO for a UK training provider in late November 2025. It runs accredited courses in youth work, social prescribing and health and social care, both in a classroom and online, and its site hovered around position 11. By August 2026 monthly clicks were 130% above the December figure, and from March onwards five months in six cleared two hundred.
Results
Google clicks
Google impressions
Courses that were hard to find
The provider offers youth work qualifications at several levels, social prescribing, health and social care programmes and a large catalogue of short professional development courses. Teaching happens in person across the South East and online everywhere else in Britain. Learners include youth, support, care and mental health workers, voluntary sector staff and adults retraining for a new career.
December 2025, my first complete month, brought only a few clicks a day, at an average position near 11. The three months to December averaged about the same, so it was a fair starting line. The client wanted top-three rankings for its core course searches, and with no blog there was nothing on the site answering what people ask before picking a course.
Reading the brief closely
These steps set out what the client asked for at sign-up and how I judged the results against it.
- 01
Name the searches that matter
The client wanted top-three places within six months for its core course terms, the generic youth work and social prescribing searches a new learner would type first. Those terms headed the priority list, ahead of the long tail of short courses, because the client had named them as the measure of success.
- 02
Plan a blog from scratch
There was no blog, and the client wanted a fully working, search-ready one as part of the strategy, in plain, accessible English with no jargon. Someone weighing up a qualification needs plain answers to practical questions before committing to a course.
- 03
Hold the numbers to a target
The client asked for organic traffic to rise by at least 40% within six months. I tracked clicks month by month against that bar rather than waiting for a six-month verdict.
- 04
Keep the comparison clean
I compared each month with December 2025, my first complete month, and set the earliest three months against the most recent three to smooth out single-month noise.
The tally at nine months
August 2026 brought 130% more clicks than December. By May, the sixth complete month, clicks were already up by more than 80%, against a 40% traffic goal. The most recent three months brought roughly 100% more clicks than the earliest three.
Reach grew faster still. Monthly impressions went from about 4,200 to roughly 21,000, and across the three-month windows the site was shown 180% more often. Average position eased from about 9 to 11 over the same windows as the site began to appear for many more searches, so I judge the gain on clicks and impressions rather than rank.
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