Data as of 9 September 2026 · Site live for about 3 months
Who this case is for
If you run an information site, a review site or a site meant to earn from product referral links, and you keep publishing articles but feel some of them never show up on Google, this case explains why, and how one change to the site structure can fix it.
It is also for site owners who already rank on page 1 of Google but get few clicks, and for anyone who installed GA4 and assumes it counts everything, when it may not be counting anything at all.
We do not name the website, the car brand or the car models, to protect the site owner’s privacy.
1. The starting point: an EV information site written by a real owner
This is a Thai-language information site about one Chinese electric car brand, covering both its full-electric and hybrid models. Content includes prices, installment tables, reviews, problems owners run into, news, insurance and calculators. The site is not a dealer, and plans to earn in future from referral links for accessories. As of writing this case there is no revenue data yet.
It has 2 audiences: people researching before they buy, and people who already own the car. What makes it different from general car news sites is that the site owner drives this model himself, so the articles about problems come from real experience.
The site launched around 10 June 2026. We started working on it on 9 July 2026. At that point the site was still small and had 3 problems:
- Ranking on page 1 but not getting clicks, especially for installment-table searches
- Google had never crawled some pages at all, even though they were published
- No way to know whether people used the site’s tools, because measurement was incomplete
Our way of working is to open Search Console first every time, fix only what the data points to, then come back and measure again. No guessing.
2. What we found and what we did
On page 1, but people saw it and did not click
Search Console data for the 3 months up to 27 July 2026, which in practice was the site’s first 7 weeks or so, showed 414 clicks from 9,670 impressions, a CTR of 4.3% and an average position of 6.8, which already counts as page 1.
But when we broke it down by search term, installment-table searches were seen a lot and almost nobody clicked.
| Search term (model not named) | Impressions | Clicks |
|---|---|---|
| Installment table, main model, full-electric version | 306 | 0 |
| Installment table, small model, 2026 | 253 | 2 |
| Installment table, main model, hybrid version | 104 | 3 |
| Installment table, main model, 2026 | 101 | 0 |
| Problems with the main model, full-electric version | 35 | 9 |
For the first four terms combined, Google showed this site 764 times and it got only 5 clicks. Meanwhile, the search about the car’s problems had a CTR of about 26% from just 35 impressions.
Our reading of this: people searching for an installment table want one number, “how much per month”. If the page title on Google does not show that number, they click a page that does. For problem searches, people want to hear from a real owner, and this site answers exactly that.
What we changed on 30 July 2026:
- Put the real minimum monthly payment in the page title, so people see the answer while still on Google
- Added a “short answer” box at the top of articles, so visitors find the answer immediately without scrolling
- Split the installment tables into 10 pages by sub-model, instead of cramming every model onto one page
- Allowed Google to show large images, and added an llms.txt file so AI systems can read the site structure easily
To be honest, we have not re-measured the CTR of the installment-table terms since the change, so we do not yet know how well this worked.
27 pages Google had never crawled
On 29 August 2026 we checked the indexing report in Search Console. Google had indexed 52 pages and had not indexed 34. Of those not indexed, 27 pages had the status “Discovered – currently not indexed”, and the last-crawled date was blank. That means Google knew these pages existed but had never crawled them even once.
We compared the indexed pages with the stuck pages and found a very clear difference.
Pages in the menu or footer automatically get a link from every page on the site, which here was 87 links. The stuck articles had only 2 to 13 links pointing to them, all from the body of other articles.
For a site less than 3 months old with no links from other websites at all, Google spends limited time crawling it. It chooses to crawl the pages that look important first, and pages linked from every page look the most important. So articles with only a few links kept getting pushed back in the queue.
What we fixed: we added a “News & Updates” column to the site footer and put the stuck articles in it. 8 stuck articles immediately went from 2–13 internal links to 87.
Growing the site from 42 to 92 pages
While fixing the problems above, the site kept growing. Every group of pages we added came from terms people actually search or questions owners actually ask each other.
What we added during this period:
- A combined price page and 10 installment-table pages by sub-model, answering the site’s most-seen search terms
- Model comparison pages for people torn between the full-electric and hybrid versions
- Market analysis articles, such as best-selling EVs in China and the 3 biggest EV brands in Thailand
- A cluster of insurance articles, written without tying them to any one insurer
- 4 calculators and a tools hub page: installments, charging cost, GAP insurance cover for when a car is stolen or written off (which calculates the early hire-purchase settlement discount using the tiered method used in Thailand), and battery compensation
- An accessories page and a paint and body repair centre page
In late August we adjusted the tone of the whole site, removing 50 pieces of boilerplate text from 54 files so it reads like the owner telling his own story, and set a rule that every number must have a source. Articles about problems are written as “case logs” with dates, current status and a timeline, not vague accounts.
Behind-the-scenes work readers never see
- Site-wide schema: BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, Car and Article on every relevant page. Calculators use WebApplication together with FAQPage. One sub-model page has VideoObject and an ImageGallery with 18 images. The last-modified date is pulled from each article’s real data
- Share images: all 59 cover images were WebP files, which Facebook and LINE display as blank cards. So we made a matching 1200×630 JPG for every image
- A GA4 that had never counted anything: we set GA4 to count 2 events, calculator use and main button taps. 3 days after installation, neither event had ever reached GA4, not even once. The cause was that the calculator code could not see GA4’s
gtagvariable, because of the way Astro scopes scripts. We fixed it, and connected GA4 to Search Console
3. Results
Google indexed 25 more pages in 11 days
We came back to measure on 9 September 2026, 11 days after the footer fix.
This is the clearest result of the case. The fix involved no new articles and no links from other websites. We only changed where internal links pointed, and Google came and crawled the whole group of pages it had been skipping.
Cumulative clicks passed 1,000
Which pages brought in the most visitors
We looked only at the main model’s pages, for the 3 months up to 29 August 2026. This group got 465 clicks from 11,100 impressions, a CTR of 4.2% and an average position of 6.6.
The pages with the most clicks were written from a real owner’s experience: problems, downsides and what to check at delivery. Not spec pages or news pages. People about to buy an EV want to know what it is really like to live with, and you cannot get that from a brochure.
What we don’t know yet
- The CTR of installment-table terms after the title change: not re-measured yet
- Calculator use and button taps in GA4: no data we can summarise yet
- Revenue from product referral links: no data yet
- Site speed (Lighthouse / PageSpeed): not measured yet
One more thing worth knowing: on 25 August 2026, Ahrefs estimated this site ranked for only about 2 keywords and got about 3 visits a month, while Search Console on 29 August 2026 counted 822 cumulative clicks. Ahrefs figures are estimates and often lag behind new sites. This site has no links from other websites at all. If you are measuring a site that is only a few months old, rely on Search Console.
Expected results from here
The numbers above are real results. Below are the opportunities from search terms the site has just built pages for. These are not results yet.
Another example: if the main model’s high-performance sub-model page reaches position 1, we estimate it would get about 15–20 clicks a month. This is a forecast, not a result.
Checklist for information and product review websites
Open your website and answer each point.
Getting Google to find your pages
- Open the Pages report in Search Console: are any pages marked “Discovered – currently not indexed”?
- Every important article is linked from the menu, footer or a category hub page, not only from the body of other articles
- After updating an existing article, request re-indexing, then check which version Google has stored
Getting people to click
- Your page titles on Google contain the answer searchers want, such as the monthly payment, not just the product name
- The top of each article has a short answer, so people in a hurry can finish in a few seconds
- Review and problem articles contain real experience, dates and the current status
Measurement
- You have tested that GA4 events actually arrive, not just that the tag is installed
- Cover images have a JPG or PNG version for sharing, not WebP only
- You rely on Search Console, and do not judge a site that is only a few months old by estimates from external tools
If you cannot tick more than half, there are probably good pages on your site that Google still cannot see.
Questions information site owners often ask us
I’ve written articles, so why won’t Google index them? A common cause on new sites is that the article has too few internal links pointing to it, so Google puts it near the back of the queue. In this case, the stuck pages had 2–13 inbound links. Once we added them to the footer and they had 87, Google indexed 25 more pages in 11 days.
I’m on page 1 but people don’t click. What should I fix? Look at what people searching that term want to know, and put that answer in the page title. For installment-table searches, people want to know the monthly amount. If your title only says “installment table”, they will click another site that shows the number.
Can I just put every article in the footer? You should not add them all. A footer that is too long gets cluttered and hard to use. Pick the stuck articles or the most important ones first, swap them out once Google has indexed them, or build category hub pages linked from the main menu instead.
I’m not a dealer. What do I gain from a product information site? This case shows that an independent information site written from real experience got more than 1,000 Google clicks within about 3 months, without a single link from another website. As for turning readers into revenue, such as through product referral links, this site has no data yet, so we cannot answer that with numbers.
We build websites and do SEO for information sites like this
If you have an information, review or article site with lots of content but Google still does not see many of your pages, start with a free website audit. We will open Search Console to see which pages are stuck and why. Or see our SEO services.