Results
Sixty days of a garage's life on Google, with the numbers and the caveats
Every figure below is Google's own, from Search Console, or a measurement you can repeat with a free tool. The garage is real, the dates are real, and the parts that have not worked yet are on the page too, because a results page with only the good half is an advert.
The garage
A one-person remapping and diagnostics specialist near Chester
No website before July 2026. A Google profile with a single review. Work from word of mouth and Facebook. A typical specialist: high-value jobs, customers who travel, a map pack dominated by two established garages with hundreds of reviews.
7 → 42
clicks from Google, 30 days vs 30 before
213 → 2,399
impressions
Not listed → 3rd
map pack, main money search
1 → 11
Google reviews
Before launch
Google Business Profile rebuilt: correct primary category, every service ticked, exact hours, service area matching where the owner drives, photos of real work, review link on his phone. One review at this point.
22 July
Site live: a page per service, a page for the home town, a guides section, quote form through our own mailer. Sitemap submitted. First week: 14 clicks, 400 impressions.
Weeks 2 to 4
Left alone on purpose. Nothing is graded before it is four weeks old. Reviews asked for at the end of every job: 7 by mid-August.
Week 5
Third in the map pack for the main money search, checked by eye, not by a tool. Eighteen titles rewritten after the data showed pages being shown and not clicked.
Week 6
A page for a nearby town, after the data showed 93 monthly searches with no competitor targeting it. The home-town page redirected into the homepage after losing to it on every search. 11 reviews.
End of August
Clicks +500%, impressions +1,026%, 39 of 40 pages indexed. The competitive organic search at position 11 with no clicks yet. The report says reviews, not the website, are now the limit.
Read the numbers properly
Two figures that look wrong and are not
- Click-through rate fell by nearly half. Impressions grew ten times faster than clicks, because the site is now shown for hundreds of searches it ranks far down for. The clicks went from 7 to 42; the percentage fell. Arithmetic, not a problem.
- Average position 35 is not his real position. Google matches “Chester” inside Winchester, Colchester and Dorchester, which is a third of all impressions and has never produced a click. The searches that matter: the brand at position 2, the money search at 11 and climbing, the map pack entered.
What has not worked yet
The honest column
- The competitive search has no clicks. Position 11 with 116 searches a month is the bottom of page one or the top of page two, and nobody clicks there. That is the next six months, not a claim.
- Reviews are now the ceiling. The map pack reads 235, 66 and 11. He has the best rating of the three and by far the fewest reviews. No website work changes that; asking every customer does.
- Percentages from a standing start flatter. Forty-two clicks is real and small. We show it because it is the truth of month two, not because it is impressive.
A second case, one week
An established tuning business: fixed in place, no rebuild
A remapping business whose site had been built elsewhere. Six area pages were 72% identical to each other, the homepage took eleven seconds to become usable on a phone, and a hero image the size of a short film loaded on every visit. We rewrote what needed rewriting and fixed the rest, measured before and after with PageSpeed Insights and our own duplication test.
11.0s → 2.4s
largest contentful paint, mobile
65 → 96
PageSpeed mobile score
72% → 29%
duplication between area pages
44
pages resubmitted for indexing
Where the numbers come from
Sources you can check
Search Console for clicks, impressions, position and indexing, per query and per page; we share the property with every client. Google's own monthly profile summary for calls and direction requests. PageSpeed Insights for speed. And the garage's diary, because the only number that pays is a booking.
The full story of the garage above, including the mistake we nearly made, is in the case study. The real monthly report, with the client's details removed, is available on request.
What is not on this page
By design
No “ranked #1” screenshots for searches nobody makes. No testimonials with a first name and a stock photo. No counters of garages served or keywords ranked. No MOT centre case study, because we do not have one with numbers yet; when we do, it goes here with the same caveats.
See what is stopping your garage from ranking
Send us your website and your town. You get a plain-English audit of where you stand against the garages already in the map pack, and a quote. No pressure, no long contract.