What Google Search Console showed after 60+ blog posts — the honest numbers
After publishing 60+ blog posts for Pixova, I went through Search Console properly for the first time in a while and pulled some patterns worth sharing.
The distribution is more extreme than I expected
The top 10% of posts by impressions account for roughly 75% of total search impressions. The bottom 50% of posts collectively generate almost nothing — single-digit impressions per month.
This isn't surprising in principle — I knew content performance would be unequal. The extent of the inequality was more stark than I'd anticipated. A small number of posts are doing almost all the work.
What separates the top performers
Looking at the characteristics of the posts with highest impressions, a few patterns:
Specificity over breadth. The posts ranking for broad terms like "AI image generator" get outcompeted by established domains. The posts ranking for "free AI image generator for teachers" or "free AI landscape generator" have room to rank because they're more specific.
Question format. Several of the better-performing posts are structured around questions people search — "can AI generate images for free," "what can you make with a free AI image generator." These capture "People Also Ask" placements alongside regular rankings.
Age. The posts with the highest impressions are the oldest. Month 8 posts have higher impressions than month 7 posts, which have higher than month 6. The compounding is real and visible in the data.
The average position distribution is interesting
Most posts sitting on page 2 (positions 11-20) are bringing almost no clicks despite reasonable impressions. The click-through rate on positions 11-20 is so low that pages with thousands of impressions generate fewer clicks than pages with hundreds of impressions at position 3-5.
This clarified something about optimization priority: moving posts from position 12 to position 5 matters more than publishing new posts targeting terms where I'll land on page 2. A smaller number of well-ranking posts outperforms a larger number of page 2 posts.
The keyword cannibalization I found
Two posts were competing for essentially the same query and splitting the impressions between them. Neither was ranking as well as one consolidated piece would have. I hadn't planned this — it emerged from independently choosing similar topics a few months apart.
Worth auditing your content for this if you've been publishing for several months. It shows up as two similar posts both appearing for the same query in Search Console data.
What I'm doing with this
Updating the top 20% of posts that are close to page 1 but not quite there. Better title tags, improved internal linking pointing at them, sometimes adding a section that addresses a related query. Moving a post from position 8 to position 3 is worth more in traffic terms than publishing two new posts.
The content production continues, but the optimization work on existing posts is now a meaningful part of the time allocation.
