<b>Average position lied to her face</b>

<b>Average position lied to her face</b>

An affiliate running a product-comparison site watched her average position hold steady at 8.4 for months. Traffic, though, kept sliding. The number said nothing was wrong.

She stopped trusting the average and pulled position by query, weighted by impressions. The flat 8.4 was hiding a split: her three money keywords had drifted from 4 to 11, while a swarm of tiny zero-traffic long-tail terms ranked 2 and dragged the mean back up.

She rewrote the intro and comparison table on the two pages owning those money keywords, adding the spec details people were actually searching.

Within five weeks those keywords climbed back to position 5, and clicks on the comparison pages rose from 1,900 to 3,400 a month — while the site average barely moved.

The lesson: an average position can sit perfectly still while the only rankings that pay you quietly collapse underneath it.