Batches 1 and 2 proved the workflow on individual pages. Batch 3 pointed it at the whole site: cut the pages dragging it down, rewrite the lead pages that matter most, and measure whether organic search as a channel actually turned. It did, starting the last week of August.
By early summer, organic clicks had slid from about 1,800 a week in March to under 1,100 by July. Average position had drifted from 8.5 to 13.0. The batch 1 and batch 2 pages were improving their share of clicks, but the site around them was getting weaker.
The diagnosis from a June site audit: hundreds of thin pages (old baby announcements, testimonials, success stories, utility pages) were ranking for searches the site could never win. They inflated impressions, pulled down CTR, and diluted how Google judged the site. Meanwhile the pages that actually bring in expectant-mother leads hadn't been rewritten in years.
237 tracked tasks closed between the June audit and mid-October. I ran the program and personally shipped 84 of them; a teammate handled most of the noindex cleanup under the same tracker.
Noindexed old baby, testimonial, success-story and utility pages that ranked for unwinnable searches.
Shipped August 5. The single highest-leverage page on the site.
Targeted at the highest-impression pages with the weakest click-through.
Options, the 7 steps, birth father, deciding after birth, telling him, teen pregnancy, adoption vs abortion, quotes, and the hub.
Content, headings, and internal links brought up to current standards.
372 flagged lines delivered to leadership; site-wide fixes ticketed to dev. Structured data and redirects cleaned up.
Weekly clicks bottomed out around 1,035 in mid-July, then jumped to 1,623 the week of August 24 and peaked at 2,108 the week of September 14. September finished as the best month of the year on clicks, position, and CTR.
Impressions fell 28% on purpose. Removing 190 thin pages means the site stops showing up for searches it was never going to win. That's why total clicks over the full window are down 7% while CTR is up 29% and the September run rate is the highest of the year. October is tracking with September (3,587 clicks in the first 14 days, CTR 1.14%, position 8.2).
The August 5 homepage rewrite (new H1, intro copy, title, meta, and five internal links into the lead pages) produced the clearest single-page result of any batch so far.
Runner-up: the Free Adoption Services page, a lead page, took a title and meta rewrite and moved CTR from 2.8% to 4.2%, clicks from 651 to 895, and organic key events from 75 to 112.
Batch 2 flagged "How Do I Tell Him I'm Pregnant" as the priority miss: a birth-mother lead page that had slipped to position 12.2. It was fully rewritten on September 15 and now sits at 6.7. The other flagged birth-mother page, Birth Father Rights, was rewritten too and still didn't move. The cause turned out to be structural, not copy: it competes with two sibling pages on the same topic. The fix is a consolidation redirect, now with dev. That's the system doing its job: flag, re-edit, and when a re-edit doesn't land, find the real reason.
Position gains show up first and clicks follow. Pages rewritten in mid-September have had four weeks.
| Page | Edit | Position | Clicks | CTR | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | Aug 5 refresh | 13.7 → 6.4 | 686 → 1,038 | 2.2% → 2.8% | ✓ Win |
| Adoption Process Overview | Aug title/meta | 13.1 → 9.4 | 415 → 677 | 0.9% → 1.4% | ✓ Win |
| Free Adoption Services · lead page | Aug title/meta | 18.3 → 16.9 | 651 → 895 | 2.8% → 4.2% | ✓ Win |
| US Adoption Statistics | Aug meta | 6.2 → 6.5 | 3,229 → 2,602 | 1.2% → 1.8% | — Hold |
| History of Adoption | Aug title/meta | 6.6 → 7.9 | 412 → 391 | 0.8% → 1.5% | ✓ Win |
| Domestic vs International | Aug title/meta | 9.0 → 8.0 | 784 → 838 | 1.1% → 1.5% | ✓ Win |
| Consent Laws by State | Aug title/meta + links | 8.7 → 9.1 | 404 → 247 | 0.3% → 0.5% | — Hold |
| The 7 Steps to Adoption · birth-mother | Sep 10 rewrite · 28d | 10.3 → 7.9 | 138 → 133 | 0.6% → 0.6% | — Hold |
| Can I Decide After I Give Birth · birth-mother | Sep 10 refresh · 28d | 12.3 → 10.2 | 39 → 25 | 0.7% → 0.7% | — Hold |
| Adoption vs Abortion · birth-mother | Sep 15 rewrite · 28d | 6.8 → 4.6 | 15 → 38 | 1.1% → 2.3% | ✓ Win |
| How Do I Tell Him I'm Pregnant · birth-mother | Sep 15 rewrite · 28d | 9.4 → 6.7 | 16 → 18 | 0.4% → 0.5% | — Hold |
| Teen Pregnancy & Relationships · birth-mother | Sep 15 rewrite | 13.4 → 8.7 | 212 → 109 | 0.9% → 1.0% | — Hold |
| Birth Father Rights · birth-mother | Sep 10 rewrite | n/a | 29 → 15 | 0.1% → 0.1% | ↻ Consolidate |
Search Console clicks, CTR, and average position. August edits: June 23 to October 14 vs March 1 to June 22. Rows marked "28d": September 17 to October 14 vs the 28 days before. High-volume informational pages (statistics, consent laws) lost clicks because the cleanup cut their impressions; CTR rose on every one of them.
GA4 key events (form submissions and calls) from organic search went from 327 to 511, up 56%, on 6% fewer organic sessions. The rewritten lead pages carried it: Free Adoption Services, the contact page, and the homepage. Traffic from AI assistants (ChatGPT and similar) more than doubled, from 53 to 130 sessions. Still small, but it's the channel to watch.
Batch 1 proved I can lift pages. Batch 2 proved I can run a program and control for what I don't control. Batch 3 shows the program moving the whole channel: fewer, better pages, higher rankings, and more leads from less traffic.