Our longest-running client: the year to August, month by month
Our Longest-Running Client Lost Two-Thirds of Its Search Visits Over the Year to August.
The year to August against the same months a year earlier. Where the traffic went, what held (the homepage kept 94% of its clicks, counting the link on its Google Business Profile), and what we'd measure first now.
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A Pest Control Company That Also Does Wildlife
The subject of this page is a pest control company with a wildlife division. We built its website and we've run it longer than any other client.
We're keeping the name off the page, the same way we did on the rebuild report. The number below is ours to publish and theirs to live with. Every figure stays exactly as we measured it.
Pest is the bigger half of this business. It isn't a pure wildlife client and we won't imply one.
Running a site for years proves we didn't get fired. It doesn't prove the site is good. This year, it wasn't.
What It Cost
A wildlife year isn't flat, so we compare the year to August against the same months a year earlier: October 2025 through August 2026, against October 2024 through August 2025. Eleven whole months on each side. The reporting tool we pull from reaches back only to late September 2024, so the earlier year has no whole September, and both years start in October. The measure is search visits from Google Analytics, the visits it files under organic search. Google Search Console only keeps 16 months, so it can't reach back far enough for two years side by side.
Search visits fell from 45,834 to 14,634. Down 68%. August alone went from 3,174 to 1,214, down 62%.
Nothing moved on this site. No rebuild, and no page moved to a new address. The pages that lost sit at the same addresses they had a year ago.
Every Month Was Down
This wasn't one bad season. Every month of the latest year ran behind the same month a year earlier.
| Month | Year before | Latest year | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| October | 5,536 | 2,427 | -56% |
| November | 3,981 | 1,768 | -56% |
| December | 3,152 | 1,061 | -66% |
| January | 3,496 | 1,018 | -71% |
| February | 2,992 | 788 | -74% |
| March | 3,691 | 1,181 | -68% |
| April | 4,708 | 1,488 | -68% |
| May | 5,419 | 1,380 | -75% |
| June | 5,478 | 1,310 | -76% |
| July | 4,306 | 1,373 | -68% |
| August | 3,174 | 1,214 | -62% |
Google Analytics doesn't add its months up to its year total exactly, so the months come to within 3% of the year totals.
The slide started before the latest year did. Search visits were still above 5,000 a month in May and June 2025, fell to 3,174 in August, and bottomed at 788 in February. From April through August they held between about 1,200 and 1,500 a month. That's not a recovery.
What Held
When we pulled the data on Sept. 25, 2026, Search Console held both years for one stretch, May 13 to Sept. 22. On those dates, Google clicks fell from 13,164 to 3,394, down 74%, and the pages a customer uses to call held far better than the articles.
| Google clicks, May 13 to Sept. 22 | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blog articles | 10,791 | 1,509 | -86% |
| Every page outside the blog: home, city, service and contact | 2,435 | 1,948 | -20% |
| Of that, the homepage, including its Business Profile link | 1,465 | 1,382 | -6% |
The first two rows add up to a little more than the site total. Google totals the site and each page separately, so the page rows run slightly above the site total.
The homepage row counts two addresses. The plain homepage address fell from 1,465 clicks to 926. This year the Business Profile link carries its own address, and that address earned 456 clicks, with none under it last year. Counted together, they're down 6%.
Only one article gained real ground. A post telling two kinds of bees apart went from 163 clicks to 286. A few city pages picked up their first clicks.
Where the Wildlife Traffic Went
On the same dates, the wildlife pages went from 5,046 clicks to 539, down 89%.
One post is most of that. A post about snakes around the house went from 4,020 clicks to 458. A post about young opossums went from 647 to 33. Every other wildlife page together went from 379 to 48.
Why It Fell
The snake post shows the pattern best. Since October 2025, the first whole month of clean position data, it has held a first-page average position in every month, between 4 and 8. On the same dates both years, its clicks fell from 4,020 to 458, down 89%. It kept its place and lost most of its clicks.
That's what it looks like when Google answers the question on the results page before anyone reaches the site. Pew Research found that people clicked a result on 8% of visits to a results page that showed an AI summary, against 15% of visits to pages that didn't. We can't prove that's what happened to this post. The pattern fits it.
Four of the six pest sites in the rebuild report's table grew over the same months. Three of them live on home, city and service pages. The fourth is the rebuild site, and it leans on articles even harder than this one, so the table doesn't settle how much was Google. On pages like theirs, the home, city, service and contact pages, this site still fell 20% on the dates Search Console holds for both years. That part is on the site, and on us.
This site's wildlife traffic lived almost entirely in blog posts. The nine pages outside the blog that name wildlife or a wild animal earned 3 clicks from May 13 to Sept. 22, 2025, and none on the same dates this year. When the articles lost their clicks, there was no service page underneath to catch the customer.
What Years of Publishing Actually Look Like
The crawl on Sept. 16, 2026 returned 629 addresses. Collapse the query-string variants and it's 505 real pages. 221 addresses sit in the blog, 220 of them posts. Most of the rest are city pages. The service section is small.
Nine pages outside the blog name wildlife or a wild animal in the address, and five of those are about specific animals: fox, snake, squirrel, bats, and raccoons and opossums. The other four are general wildlife pages that overlap each other.
For years, steady publishing carried this site. This year it's the reason the site had nowhere to fall back to.
What We Haven't Fixed Yet
We built this site and we've run it for years. These are still open, and every one of them is ours. They're on this client's list now. When they close, this page gets the after numbers.
- 16 pages all carrying the same title, "Pest Control", 15 of them city pages. Sixteen pages with the same label, so the title does nothing to tell Google which town each one serves.
- 3 more all titled "Professional Pest Control Services".
- Three city pages that each exist twice, once at their address and once with "-2" on the end. True duplicates.
- Two flea extermination pages for one service, one with the company name added to its address.
- Two crawl space encapsulation pages, one of them inside the services section. Same problem, different service.
- Seven blog posts republished with a timestamp on the end of the address, so each runs against its own earlier copy.
- Seven addresses with index.php in them are live, each one pointing its canonical at itself, and Google has indexed three of them. Two more are document downloads. Our crawl didn't reach them. Search Console did.
One thing we want exact, because a confession that overstates itself is still a bad report. The 56 duplicate-title groups our first pass flagged collapse to 9 once query-string variants come out, and about 80 pages are correctly canonicalized, which is the system working. The real problem is thin, repeated titles on city pages, plus those duplicate addresses.
What We Would Measure First Now
Clicks by page, every month, against the same month a year earlier. A page that holds its ranking but loses its clicks is the early sign that Google has started answering the question itself. That comparison catches it inside a single month.
Then the fix that sign calls for. A real service page for every animal the company works, so a customer who wants the job done has somewhere to land that isn't an article Google can summarize.
Why We Are Telling You This
It's easy to make a year like this look like growth. Compare a strong stretch of one year with a weaker stretch of another, and you're measuring the calendar, not the site. So this page compares the whole year to August against the same months a year earlier.
You're going to hire somebody who reports on their own work. Some quarter, your numbers will move the wrong way, and the report that lands on your desk will either say so or find a chart that hides it. This is the report that says so, about the client we've run the longest.
If you want your own pages checked the same way before you decide anything, book a call or send a note and we'll walk them with you.
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Why the Year to August, and Why Search Visits?
Because what drives a wildlife call shifts through the year. A few months against a few months measures the calendar, not the website. October through August against the same months a year earlier puts nearly every season on both sides, in whole months. Search Console can't reach back two years, so the year number is Google Analytics search visits. Where Search Console holds both years, the page shows Google clicks too.
Why Only Two Years, for a Client You've Run for Years?
Search Console keeps 16 months of data and deletes the rest, and the reporting tool we pull from reaches back only to late September 2024. So the longest honest comparison is this year against last year.
Did Anything Go Up?
A little. One article went up by about three-quarters, the only one with a real gain. A few city pages earned their first clicks, and the homepage and its Business Profile link, counted together, held within 6%. The pages a customer uses to call held up far better than the articles did.
Would You Publish a Page Like This About My Company?
We keep every client's name off these pages, gains and losses alike. The numbers stay exactly as measured.