SEO

Why SEO works differently than expected

Most people think of SEO as one main keyword: "we want to be number one for electrician Freiburg." That's the most expensive and slowest route, because everyone else wants that spot too.

The leverage sits elsewhere. People rarely search for the category, they search for their specific case: a location, a particular service, a product. Each of those queries has little volume; together they add up to serious reach, with far less competition. For the Hofladen portal that meant over 10,000 organic clicks in two years, spread across 276 business pages.

What position one is actually worth

SISTRIX analysed over 80 million search terms and broke click-through rates down by position. Position one receives roughly 28 percent of clicks on average, position two just under 16, position three 11. At position ten, the bottom of page one, 2.5 percent remains.

The study warns about that average itself: depending on how the results page is built, the click rate at position one ranged between 13.7 and 46.9 percent. A search with a map, ads, or an AI answer at the top behaves completely differently from a plain list of links.

The practical conclusion holds regardless. The gap between first and fifth place is larger than the gap between fifth place and not ranking at all. So it rarely pays to fight for position seven on a heavily contested keyword when you could hold position one for twenty more specific queries.

Why many small queries matter

The search terms everyone competes for are a small minority. In Ahrefs' US database, roughly 93 percent of all recorded search terms have fewer than ten searches per month, while just under 18,000 terms exceed 100,000 searches.

That figure describes the distribution of search terms, not of search volume, and the difference matters. It still shows the underlying pattern: there are very few large queries and very many small ones. On top of that, according to Google around 15 percent of daily searches are asked for the first time ever.

For your site that means the sum of many specific pages usually beats a single page aiming at the big keyword. For the Hofladen portal that was 276 individual business pages, which together brought over 10,000 organic clicks.

What I do

Technical foundation. Load times, clean URL structure, a correct sitemap, structured data so search engines understand what a page is about. That's the precondition, not the service.

Structure that follows search behaviour. Anything that could trigger its own search gets its own page. Whatever hides behind a filter or a search box does not exist for search engines.

Local visibility. Google Business Profile, identical listings across the relevant directories, location pages for the catchment area. At VÖGELE that meant dedicated pages for 15 towns around Freiburg.

Content that answers questions. Guides for the research phase, when nobody is ready to buy yet. Whoever reads the provider comparison today becomes a customer in four weeks.

What to expect

SEO works slowly and then permanently. You see the first movement after six to twelve weeks, reliable results after a few months. In exchange, the effect doesn't stop when you stop paying, unlike ads.

So the honest comparison isn't the cost of the optimisation, it's what the same clicks would cost every month through paid ads. That's exactly what the calculator below works out.