Our own site, elsewhere
What one guide earned in five weeks: the MOT page on our own garage site, and what it means for a Portsmouth trade
garageseo.co.uk is our site for garages, launched on 29 August 2026 with 34 pages. In its first five weeks one page did most of the earning: a guide on how MOT centres rank for "MOT near me" reached an average position of 8.2 and a 7.8% click rate, four clicks from 51 impressions, while the home page sat at 34 on 225 impressions with a 1.3% rate. This page is about why that one worked, with the real numbers, because the same thing happens on every trade site we run and it is the opposite of what most Portsmouth trades are told to publish.
By Daniel Stoychev, Webso Digital · 6 October 2026
8.2
position of the MOT guide, 4 Sep to 3 Oct
7.8%
its click rate, 4 clicks from 51 impressions
34.4
the home page's position in the same window
9
clicks on the whole site in its first five weeks
The figures
One guide, the home page, and the rest
| Page | Impressions | Clicks | Position | What it was written for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /guides/mot-near-me-how-mot-centres-rank | 51 | 4 | 8.2 | One specific search a garage owner makes: why the garage up the road shows for MOT near me and theirs does not |
| / | 225 | 3 | 34.4 | The head term, garage seo, which has about 49 impressions and sits at 23.5 |
| /guides/google-business-profile-for-garages | 24 | 1 | 12.6 | A how-to on the profile fields, again one specific question |
| /google-ads-for-garages | 32 | 1 | 67.5 | A service page, found by a long search rather than the one it targets |
| Everything else | A few hundred between them | 0 | 45 to 100 | Service pages and the rest of the guides, settling |
Why that page
It answered one question a real person types, and nobody else had
"Why does the other garage show for MOT near me" is a question a garage owner types at ten at night. It has a specific, honest answer involving the Google Business Profile, the category, the service list and the reviews, and almost nobody had written it plainly. The guide opens with the answer in its first paragraph, which is what Google and the AI assistants lift, and it is about one thing. The home page is about everything, which is why it is on page four for the head term and will be for months.
The lesson is the one most Portsmouth trades are given backwards. They are told to write a blog about the business; the page that earns is the one that answers the customer's question, or the owner's, in its first sentence.
What it means for a Portsmouth trade
Pick the question, not the keyword
A plumber in Fratton has a dozen of these questions in their phone's call history: why the boiler fault code appears in October, what a landlord gas safety certificate involves, whether a combi can go in a loft. Each is a search, each has a plain answer, and a page per question reaches page one faster than any amount of work on the home page, because the competition for the question is thin and the competition for "plumber Portsmouth" is not.
The measurement is the same as ours: impressions for the question, then clicks, then the calls that mention it. On the garage site the MOT guide's four clicks were four garage owners who read the whole page, and that is the audience a guide is for.
The same measurements, on your site
The free audit reads your Search Console the same way
Every figure on this page is from Search Console or a page-by-page crawl, both free to repeat. The audit we run before quoting a Portsmouth business does the same, and you get the numbers whether or not you hire us.
How to read this page
- garageseo.co.uk is our own site; the figures are its Search Console for 4 September to 3 October 2026, the first full window after launch on 29 August.
- Four clicks is four clicks. The point is the pattern, not the size, and the pattern repeats on every trade site we run.
- No Portsmouth client is named or implied; this is a page about a method.
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