Most agencies publish the data that makes them look good. I am going to do the opposite, because the uncomfortable numbers from my own website teach something far more useful about local search in Toronto than another success story would.
Here is what Google Search Console recorded for timofey.ca over the last twelve months:
| Metric | Last 365 days | Last 90 days |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 184,411 | 113,178 |
| Clicks | 122 | 72 |
| Click-through rate | 0.07% | 0.06% |
| Average position | 36.5 | 36.4 |
A hundred and eighty-four thousand impressions and a hundred and twenty-two clicks. That is a click-through rate close to zero, and an average position around 36, which means page three or four of the results.
Now, why publish that?
Lesson one: the demand is enormous and provable
The first thing that number establishes is that people in Toronto and the GTA are searching for this constantly. 184,000 impressions means Google showed my site in results 184,000 times. The audience is not hypothetical.
The same is almost certainly true in your category. Whatever you sell, if you are a service business in Toronto, there is a large volume of search demand you are currently visible for and getting nothing from. Most business owners never look, so they conclude quietly that "SEO does not work for our industry". Usually the truth is that they are on page four, where the traffic is zero regardless of demand.
Some real query-level numbers from the same period:
| Query | Impressions | Average position |
|---|---|---|
| custom web design toronto | 2,037 | 37.7 |
| website redesign services | 1,513 | 54.8 |
| wordpress design toronto | 901 | 18.4 |
| richmond hill web design | 753 | 27.5 |
| wordpress agency toronto | 750 | 30.3 |
| landing page design toronto | 731 | 10.0 |
| wordpress experts toronto | 495 | 19.1 |
Lesson two: position three or four is the same as not existing
Look at the relationship between position and clicks. At position 36 with 2,037 impressions, "custom web design toronto" produced a single click in a year.
This is the part business owners consistently underestimate. Ranking is not a gradient where being on page four gets you a quarter of the traffic of page one. It is closer to a cliff. Roughly speaking the first result takes a quarter to a third of clicks, the top three take the majority, and everything past the first page shares a rounding error.
Which means the practical question is never "are we ranking". It is "are we in the top three". Anything else is functionally the same as being absent, and reporting that shows impressions growing while positions stay in the thirties is reporting on nothing.
Lesson three: proof content outranks service pages
This is the finding I did not expect, and it is the most immediately actionable thing in the whole dataset.
| Page | Average position |
|---|---|
| Homepage | 35.7 |
| Business website Toronto service page | 55.4 |
| Website design service page | 37.5 |
| Case study: Circles Enrichment | 6.8 |
| Case study: Vanguard Locksmith | 8.0 |
| Case study: Bird & Berry Cakes | 8.1 |
| Case study: Alasya Construction | 9.8 |
| Case study: Olga Hutsul Photography | 12.4 |
My service pages, the ones deliberately optimised for commercial keywords, sit between position 35 and 55. My case studies, which exist mainly as proof for prospects who are already talking to me, sit between position 6 and 12.
The gap is not subtle, and the explanation is not mysterious. Case studies contain specific, first-hand, verifiable information: a named business, a real problem, actual work, measurable outcomes. Service pages contain claims that every competitor also makes. One of those is genuinely distinctive content. The other is a category description.
If you take one thing from this article, take that. The content most likely to rank is the content documenting work you have already done. Most businesses have years of it and publish none of it.
Lesson four: everything concentrates on the homepage
Of 184,411 impressions, 138,329 landed on the homepage. That is roughly three quarters of all visibility on a single page.
That pattern is a symptom rather than a success. It means Google could not identify a better-matched page for most queries and fell back to the homepage, which is a strong signal that the individual service and location pages are not differentiated enough to earn the match themselves.
The fix is structural: pages that target one thing clearly, differentiated from each other, with internal linking that makes the hierarchy obvious. This is exactly why generic location pages fail. Eleven near-identical pages with a city name swapped tell Google nothing, and I have the data to show it, because the ones I built that way have between 100 and 700 impressions each and rank nowhere.
Location pages work when they contain locally specific substance: real clients in that area, real projects, real local context. Compare the Etobicoke page and the Richmond Hill page, both of which do meaningfully better than the thinner ones.
Lesson five: the CTR problem is separate from the ranking problem
Even where I rank respectably, clicks lag. "Landing page design toronto": 731 impressions at position 10, two clicks.
Position 10 is the bottom of page one, and increasingly page one is not a list of ten links. It is an AI overview, a map pack, some ads, and then the organic results. Being tenth on that page means being below the fold, below the answer most people already read.
Which is the entire commercial argument for GEO optimization. When an AI-generated summary occupies the position the traffic used to flow through, the objective shifts from ranking in the list to being cited in the answer. That is a different technical problem, addressed in what an AI-driven website actually means.
What I am doing about it, and what you should do
The plan that follows from this data, for my site and probably for yours:
- Publish proof content aggressively. It is the only content type in my dataset that reliably reaches the top ten. Every completed project is a candidate.
- Differentiate the pages that currently blur together. One clear target per page, genuinely distinct from its neighbours, with real local substance on location pages.
- Fix the technical foundation for AI citation. Complete structured data, clean document structure, direct answers stated early.
- Stop measuring impressions. Track position for a small set of queries that actually convert, and clicks. Impressions grow while nothing happens.
- Be patient with the right things. Ranking movements from structural work take months. Most people abandon at week six, which is roughly when it starts working.
And the meta-lesson, which is why I published unflattering numbers about my own business: this level of honesty is itself rare enough to be a differentiator. Every competitor’s blog says they deliver results. Almost none of them show the data.
Want to see what your own Search Console data says? I will go through it with you and tell you plainly whether the problem is rankings, click-through, or that nobody is searching. Ask for a search visibility review.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends heavily on position. The first organic result typically earns somewhere between 25 and 30 per cent of clicks, the top three take the majority, and results past the first page earn close to nothing. A very low overall CTR combined with high impressions almost always means you are ranking on page three or worse, not that your titles are bad.
Almost always because the impressions are at low positions. Google counts an impression when your page appears in results a user could scroll to, including page four. Tens of thousands of impressions at an average position in the thirties is normal and produces almost no traffic. Fix position first, then titles.
Only when they contain genuinely local substance: real clients in that area, real projects, local context. Pages produced by swapping a city name into a template are treated as thin duplicate content and rank poorly. My own data shows exactly that pattern across eleven GTA location pages.
Because they contain specific, first-hand, verifiable information that no competitor can duplicate: a named client, a real problem, actual work and measurable outcomes. Service pages tend to make the same claims as every competitor, which gives search engines nothing to prefer them for.
Structural improvements typically take three to six months to move positions meaningfully, and longer in competitive categories like Toronto web design. Content and technical fixes can be indexed within days, but ranking changes lag well behind. Most businesses give up shortly before the work starts paying off.
Both, because they share most of the same foundation. Clean structure, complete structured data, fast pages and genuinely useful content serve traditional rankings and AI citation simultaneously. GEO adds emphasis on direct answers and first-hand information that survives summarisation.
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