Search
The pages Google sends people to are worth arriving at
cross.ranked-but-unengaged
Why this matters
A page can rank well, be clicked, and then disappoint everybody who arrives — and neither source can tell you that alone. Search Console sees the click and stops watching; Analytics sees the visit and does not know what was searched for. Put together they show pages where Google's promise and the page's delivery do not match, which is a content problem rather than a technical one and is invisible in either tool by itself.
Who fixes it
You can, usually
Roughly how long
an hour per page
Care needed
Low risk to change
How to fix it
Search the term this page ranks for and read your own result as a stranger would, then open the page and ask whether the first screen answers what the search asked. The usual mismatch is a page that eventually answers the question below three paragraphs of preamble, or a title promising something the page treats as a footnote. Fixing the opening is usually enough, and it is a great deal cheaper than trying to rank something else.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 16 points off your search score. This one is a measurement rather than a fact about your markup, so two scans of an unchanged site can legitimately differ a little.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 121. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther search checks
- Canonical tags point somewhere validA canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. When it points somewhere wrong — another domain, a dead page, or the wrong protocol — Google follows it anyway, and the page you wanted indexed can be dropped in favour of one that does not exist.
- Content has been updated recentlySome content is meant to sit still, and age alone is not a fault. But prices, opening hours and staff pages that have not been touched in over a year are usually wrong by now — and a visitor who acts on the wrong opening hours does not come back to check whether the rest was right.
- Descriptions are a sensible lengthLong descriptions get truncated mid-sentence; very short ones waste the space you are given.
- Each page has exactly one title tagA page can only have one title. When there are several, the browser and Google each pick one — and they do not always pick the same one, so what you see in the tab may not be what appears in search.
- Each page has one main headingSeveral top-level headings makes the structure of the page ambiguous. Worth checking rather than urgent — modern HTML permits it, and Google handles it, but it usually signals that headings are being chosen for their size.
- Each search you rank for is served by one page rather than severalWhen several of your pages answer the same search, the things that decide ranking — links, engagement, relevance — are divided between them instead of accumulating on one. Google picks whichever it currently thinks is best and can change its mind week to week, and the result is that a search you should own is served by two or three pages, none of which does well. It is invisible from inside the site: every page looks fine on its own.