VS3, September 7 2026
In July we spent 24 hours on the plumbing of learningleader.com. Your search traffic has doubled since, and it is still climbing. This is what that produced, what we found when we went to look at the pages those new visitors actually arrive on, and what we would like to do next.
Clicks per day
51→100
+96%
Impressions per day
9,560→20,769
+117%
Non-brand clicks per day
8→39
+380%
Non-brand impressions per day
3,523→12,829
+264%
Daily averages. Before is June 29 to July 8, the ten days of history that exist prior to the work. Now is the ten days to September 5. Non-brand means every search that is not your name, the show's name, or the book's title, so it is the audience that did not already know you.
A fair question
You launched The Price of Becoming on July 21, two weeks into this window, and we did not want to hand you your own launch back as though it were our work. So we split every search into brand and non-brand, and waited for the launch spike to decay before drawing any comparison.
The clean proof
Episode 537 is Aron Ralston, the hiker from 127 Hours. It existed at two addresses, one of 543 duplicate pairs on your site. We pointed the duplicate at the real page and changed nothing else about it.
| All addresses combined | Before | Now | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks per day | 0.8 | 27.7 | 34x |
| Impressions per day | 552 | 6,138 | 11x |
| Average position | 9.4 | 7.8 | up 1.6 |
The mechanism
This is the number that explains the rest. Two matched ten-day windows, one before the work and one ending September 5:
| Ten-day window | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Distinct addresses earning impressions | 915 | 807 |
| Impressions those addresses earned | 101,165 | 211,908 |
| Share landing on the real episode page | 18% | 60% |
Google is showing fewer of your pages and sending twice the traffic. That is consolidation doing what it should. Duplicate addresses stopped competing with the pages they were copies of, and real episode pages surfaced in their place. A visit that used to land on a dead-end copy now lands on the episode itself, with the player, the show notes and the links on it.
Since then: the sample chapter page for the book, the rebuilt signup forms, and the assistant on your episodes page that answers from your own transcripts.
The gap
We went and read the 20 pages that now carry the most search traffic on your site. Between them they took 322,787 impressions in the last 28 days, which is 58% of everything Google shows for you. Here is what a person who lands on one of them is offered.
| What the page offers the visitor | Pages | |
|---|---|---|
| Promotes The Score That Matters, your previous book | 20 of 20 | all of them |
| Mentions The Price of Becoming, your current book | 5 of 20 | a quarter |
| Links to Stitcher, which closed in August 2023 | 18 of 20 | dead link |
| Says Text HAWK, the old SMS signup | 12 of 20 | retired |
| Invites the reader to Mindful Monday | 20 of 20 | working |
| Mentions Leadership Circles | 20 of 20 | working |
The fifteen pages that never mention your current book took 291,107 impressions and 1,005 clicks in 28 days. Your single biggest page, the Aron Ralston episode, is one of them.
None of this is a criticism of how the site was built. It is what happens to any archive with 700 entries. The newest pages get updated and the older ones keep the offer they were published with. That only started to cost you anything when the older pages became the way most people arrive, which is what the July work did.
So the first thing we would do is not more SEO. It is to make the traffic you already have worth having. One offer block, edited in one place, applied to the pages that carry the traffic, pointing at the book you are actually selling and the newsletter you actually want people on. When your offer changes again, it changes in one place instead of 700.
The second opportunity
Your episodes rank on the first page of Google for questions that have nothing to do with leadership podcasts, and almost nobody clicks.
| What they search | Your position | Times shown | Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| alone season 6 winner | 2.4 | 778 | 3 |
| is 127 hours a true story | 6.0 | 740 | 1 |
| how did aron ralston not bleed out | 9.3 | 623 | 1 |
| brent underwood wife | 4.8 | 421 | 0 |
| mark cuban net worth | 2.1 | 345 | 6 |
| how much do banana ball players make | 2.1 | 96 | 2 |
You are the second result in the world for alone season 6 winner and three people clicked in a month. That is not a headline problem. Our read is that someone asking who won a survival show sees a podcast episode, assumes it will not answer the question, and scrolls to a page that will.
This one decides what we spend your money on. When somebody searches aron ralston, we are competing with Aron Ralston. He owns that search and he always will, and the same is true of Mark Cuban and every guest with their own following. We are not going to try to beat them.
What we can win is the slice underneath. Some of those searchers do not want a summary written by a stranger. They want the story from the man who was in the canyon. You have that. You have it on tape, in his own voice, because you asked him yourself. Nobody else in the results does. The job is making sure Google can tell.
In practice that means putting the questions people are genuinely typing on the page as headings, answering each one in a sentence or two drawn from what your guest actually said, and pointing at the moment in the episode where he says it. Written that way the page can be quoted directly in Google's own answers and in ChatGPT's, and both of those cite the source they quote.
And the answers do not have to give everything away. They can work like the cold open you already put at the top of an episode: enough to make somebody want the rest.
Fifteen searches sit just off the first page, at positions 10 to 12. These are pages that need a reason to be preferred, not a new title.
| Search | Position | Times shown in 28 days |
|---|---|---|
| brady quinn | 10.8 | 14,078 |
| jesse itzler | 10.8 | 11,004 |
| nicole lepera | 12.2 | 7,871 |
| will guidara | 11.4 | 4,679 |
| oz pearlman | 12.7 | 4,138 |
The offer
You have 700 conversations on tape, most of them first-hand and not available anywhere else. That asset is worth more now than it was two years ago, because Google and ChatGPT increasingly answer a question by quoting a source, and both of them cite the page they quote. The answers people are searching for are already in your archive. Most of them are still inside the audio.
Getting them onto the page, and keeping the page current as you keep publishing, is what we would like to do every month. It is also the most direct route to signups you have, because somebody who arrives on a page that answers the question they asked, and is then offered Mindful Monday, is a better prospect than somebody who arrives on a player. It is monthly rather than a project with an end because you publish four more episodes next month, and your offer will have changed again before the year is out.
One offer block, managed centrally, rolled out to the twenty pages carrying 58% of your search traffic. It points at the book you are selling now and the newsletter you want people on, and the dead Stitcher links and the retired Text HAWK come out with it. Then we put counting in place, so from month two we can tell you how many signups and book clicks came from Google rather than guessing.
Roughly 600 of your episodes still have no custom search title or description. The replacement copy is already written and fact-checked from your own show notes, it just needs publishing, and we would script that rather than do it by hand. Then the first guest pages get the question and answer treatment described above.
By this point the new episodes are being handled as they go out, the archive is current, and the monthly work is upgrading whichever pages your own numbers say are closest to paying off. You get the note at the end of each month telling you which ones, why those, and what happened to the ones we did last time.
$299 a month. That is under four hours at the rate you have been paying us, and the difference is that the work accumulates instead of starting over each time. Anything outside it gets quoted before we start, and the list below is what that means.
We would rather be clear now than have you find the edges later. None of the following is included, and any of it can be quoted separately:
One screen a month, four things on it, and no meeting unless you want one.
The third line is why month one is counting rather than something more visible. Right now we can prove we grew your traffic. We would rather prove we grew your list.
Two asks
Owner access to Search Console. We are read-only today, which means we can see everything and change nothing. Owner lets us resubmit sitemaps and ask Google to recrawl the pages we fix, which is the difference between a change taking days and taking weeks. Thirty seconds on your end, for ash@nickgray.net.
And the more important one: tell us what you actually want. Everything above comes from your numbers, which is a good way to find problems and a poor way to know what matters to you. If what you care about is the newsletter, we would shape the year around the newsletter. If it is filling Leadership Circles, we would shape it around that instead. If there is something on the site that has been irritating you for a year, that is worth more than anything we found on our own.