SEO Not Working? Check Which Pages Google Visitors Land On

A familiar situation. The contractor reports that traffic from Google search is up and rankings are better. But orders and leads aren’t growing. You start to think SEO “doesn’t work”. Sometimes that’s true. More often the reason is simpler: people do come to the site, just not to the pages that sell. You can check this yourself in half an hour, without a contractor.

1. What our own practice showed

For one of our clients, over three months (GA4 data for the 90 days up to 26 October 2026), about 28.7 thousand sessions came from Google search. Almost half of them (by our count, about 48%) came from blog articles, and one article alone brought in more than 11 thousand sessions. Orders from the articles: zero. Not a single key event in sessions that started on an article.

This is the experience of one site, not market statistics. We counted the 48% from the top rows of the report, so the real share may be slightly higher. But the mechanism is familiar to many online stores and service businesses.

2. Informational and commercial queries

Search queries fall roughly into two types:

• Informational: the person is looking for advice or an answer. “How to choose…”, “what is…”, “how to do it yourself”. They need an article.
• Commercial: the person is ready to choose and buy. “Buy…”, “price”, “order”, a service name with a city. They need a product, category or service page.

A blog article by nature collects informational queries. There are usually more of them, so the traffic looks impressive. But someone who searched for advice wasn’t planning to buy anything. So there is traffic and zero orders. That isn’t necessarily an SEO failure: you got visitors, just not the audience that buys.

3. How to check it yourself: GA4

You need access to Google Analytics 4. Google’s help page for the Landing page report says: on the left, click Reports, then Engagement, then Landing page. Each row of the report is the page where a session began.

1. In the Landing page report, pick a period, for example the last 90 days.
2. Add a secondary dimension. Google’s help suggests “Session source / medium” for this: it shows where visitors to each page came from. Rows with google and the medium organic are free search.
3. Look at the key events column. These are the actions you marked as important: a lead, a call, an order. If they aren’t set up, the report will show zeros everywhere and your conclusion will be wrong. First make sure key events are actually being counted.
4. Compare: which pages bring the most search sessions, and how many key events each has.

If the blog is at the top of the list and has almost no key events, you are looking at exactly our situation.

4. How to check it yourself: Search Console

Google Search Console shows how your site looks in search before anyone clicks. Google’s help for the Performance report describes the metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR (clicks divided by impressions) and average position. Above the table there are Queries and Pages tabs. By default the last three months are shown.

What to do:

• On the Pages tab, find the pages with the most clicks. These are the same articles you saw in GA4.
• Open any of them and on the Queries tab see which words bring people to it. If they are “how to…” and “what is…”, the queries are informational.
• Separately, find the pages that sell: categories, products, services. How many search clicks do they get? If clicks are few and impressions are few too, search barely sees them. Then the problem isn’t the blog but the pages themselves, and they need work of their own.

Don’t worry if the numbers in GA4 and Search Console don’t match exactly: they are different systems, and search clicks are not the same as sessions. What matters isn’t precision but the order of magnitude: which pages come first and whether they get leads. Take a snapshot and save it, you will need it at the end of this article.

5. The traffic isn’t wasted: link your articles to the pages that sell

Don’t delete articles that attract people. They already have Google’s trust and bring in visitors every day. Just give those visitors a next step.

• Lead an article about a product, or about choosing one, to the page of that product or category.
• Lead a piece of advice (“how to do it yourself”) to the service that solves the task for you.
• Make the anchor, the link text, clear. Google’s help recommends anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it points to. “Read more” and “here” explain nothing. Better: “order a Shopping ads consultation”.
• Put the link in the middle of a sentence, where the reader naturally wants to continue. Don’t put two links to the same page in one text.
• The reverse direction helps too: from a category or service page you can link to an article that explains something.

A technical detail from Google’s help: its crawler can follow a link if it is a regular <a> element with an href attribute. A button that sends people to a page with a script may not count. Google also recommends that every page you care about has a link from at least one other page on your site.

6. What to expect and how to check after 4–8 weeks

Let’s be honest: nobody guarantees that after you change your internal links the commercial pages will rise in search. In practice people say strong articles can “pull up” the pages they link to, and the logic makes sense. But Google’s help doesn’t promise that an internal link automatically improves a ranking. The result depends on the site, the competition and the page itself. So this is a hypothesis to test.

How to test it:

1. Now: write down in a spreadsheet the search clicks for 3–5 pages that sell, and the number of key events from search traffic. Take the snapshot for the last three months from Search Console.
2. Add links from your 5–10 strongest articles to those pages.
3. After 4–8 weeks: compare the same metrics for the same period. Did clicks and impressions for those pages grow in Search Console? Did key events appear in GA4 in sessions that began on articles and ended on the pages that sell?
4. If there is no growth, check whether the article fits what you sell. Maybe the reader was looking for something entirely different and the link doesn’t interest them.

One note on similar pages: sometimes an article and a category page compete for the same query, and Google “hesitates” between them. Then you keep the one that converts better and link the other to it. Here too, look at leads, not just clicks.

Summary

1. Search traffic isn’t orders: blog articles collect informational queries, and people buy on commercial ones.
2. In GA4 (Reports → Engagement → Landing page) see which pages search visitors land on and how many key events they have. In Search Console, see which queries bring people to those pages.
3. Don’t delete useful articles: add descriptive links from them to a product, category or service.
4. Internal linking is a hypothesis, not a promise. Write down the numbers today and compare after 4–8 weeks.

For more on why rankings alone guarantee nothing, read “Google Rankings Are a Poor Metric: What to Look at Instead”. And if you hesitate about where to put your money, compare the options in “Google Ads or SEO: Pros and Cons for a Business Owner”. See how we work with advertising in the Google Ads section.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will look at your account and website and tell you which pages your traffic lands on and what is worth fixing.