Topic pages brought 81 percent of the impressions and only 25 percent of the clicks
On a restaurant site, 159 guide pages about ingredients and cooking were seen far more often than the pages that sell, and clicked far less.
Impressions count how often a page appeared in Google. Clicks count how often someone chose it. A page can have many of the first and almost none of the second.
Why it matters
The guide pages sat on page one, around position 7 on average, and were seen more than 109,000 times in 28 days. Most searchers got their answer without visiting. One guide was seen 17,518 times and clicked 18 times.
This does not prove the guides are useless. They may help Google see the site as an expert on its subject, which can support the pages that sell. But they do not bring customers directly, and a total that mixes both groups hides that.
How to check your own site
- Export the Pages report from Search Console for the last 28 days.
- Mark each page as money or topic, then add up impressions and clicks for each group.
At a glance
Impressions growth on topic pages is not the same as business growth. I now report money pages and topic pages separately, so a rise in one cannot hide a fall in the other.
- Publishing my topical map multiplied impressions by almost five, and clicks went down12 Nov 2026
- My SEO site lost 82 percent of its impressions in two weeks and kept every click12 Nov 2026
- Bing showed one of my guides 377,071 times in four weeks, and almost nobody clicked9 Nov 2026
- My audit tool said 68 of 75 pages had no meta description. They did.8 Nov 2026