I asked Gert Mellak about a query on my site that showed ten searches a month in the keyword tools and eleven hundred impressions in Google Search Console over that same month. He has been doing SEO from Madrid for twenty years and has worked with 500+ businesses. His answer was bots, and he told me he had already stopped putting impressions in client reports because of it.
“We know now that Search Console is heavily impacted by bots. Lots of bots produce impressions. I used to use impressions all the time. A few months ago, still, I talked about impressions, and look, we are more visible, etc. All crap. Because we know bots are creating impressions and Google doesn’t care to filter them, apparently.”
Gert Mellak
I had published the same conclusion the day before we recorded, off my own daily export: 52% of that query’s impressions landed inside three days in July 2025, at position 72, with zero clicks. Nobody searches like that. The longer write-up is here on why Google Search Console data is not accurate, and the full episode recap is over on Unscripted SEO. This post is the practitioner version. Here is what to change in how you report.
This conversation is one of many collected in our guide to podcasting as a content and SEO strategy.
1. Take impressions out of the client report
Watch: Gert Mellak, on the episode that prompted these reporting changes.
Not caveat it. Remove it. Gert was reporting impressions a few months ago and stopped, because a rising impression count now tells you a scraper found you. If a client asks where it went, the honest answer is that Google does not filter bot impressions and you will not stake a strategy on a number you cannot clean.
The num=100 removal proved it from the other side. Half of everyone’s impressions vanished overnight when Google stopped serving a hundred results per page. Those were rank trackers. Which means the more money a keyword has, the more scraped it is, and the higher its reported search volume climbs.
2. Stop pricing projects off a volume spreadsheet
Volume times CTR times conversion rate times lifetime value is the model every one of us has built. Gert’s view of it is short: “I think search volume has really very little value as a metric on its own.” With sixty-eight percent of Google searches ending without a click, per Rand Fishkin’s latest number, the top of that formula is measuring something that mostly does not happen.
“Thinking that you still can calculate an ROI based on a traffic metric or a search volume metric, I think is insane.”
Gert Mellak
The real cost is what it does to keyword selection. Gert described a client who chose keywords too broad for their niche because the narrower ones did not have enough volume to make the projection come out positive:
“We go for keywords in SEO that we wouldn’t go for, just in order to make sure the spreadsheet shows a positive expected ROI. Which is not going to happen after six months, because the keywords are useless.”
Gert Mellak
The spreadsheet picked the strategy. Six months later it failed and the spreadsheet was never blamed.
3. Settle keyword arguments with three weeks of Google Ads
This is the most portable thing in the episode. When a client insists on a keyword, do not argue about the estimate. Buy it.
Gert has clients pick the three keywords they think will make or break the business, run ads on them for three weeks, then restart the SEO project. They come back saying they got zero conversions from three weeks of people searching that exact phrase, or that the 2,500 volume was really 120. A small ad budget resolves in three weeks what would otherwise eat six months of retainer and end in a lost account.
4. Report directionally, and never a single ranking
Gert sends a Monday update saying related queries for a topic are rising. He does not say a keyword hit position three, because the client will type it in, see position five, and stop trusting you.
His team keeps a master tracking list of ten or twenty keywords at a time, even on sites with 1,500 pages. Narrow tracking is what makes cross-referencing possible. Do Semrush and Ahrefs agree on this one? What does Search Console say? What is sitting in direct that might be organic? You cannot run that check across five hundred terms, and you do not need to.
“The first point is to acknowledge that whatever data we get is flawed. Every single platform’s data is flawed”
Gert Mellak
5. Replace the traffic metric with a high-intent metric
Gert’s internal measure is high intent, defined as a soft conversion. People landing on the pages he expects them to hit before they convert. The service page. The course page. The pricing and features page.
“It just tells me how many people are now getting to your key pages,” he said. It counts across every channel, which gives the email team and the PPC team something to move together instead of fighting over attribution. And it does not care whether Google reported the impression. Build it as a destination-page report and track the trend, not the absolute.
6. Cross-reference your channel data against a session recorder
Before we hit record I showed Gert a case where Google Analytics logged a hundred clicks and fifty landed in direct. Microsoft Clarity showed those fifty were bots. If you have been telling clients that unattributed direct is probably your organic work, check it before you say it again.
7. Audit content down, not up
Gert explains site scope to clients with a join-the-dots puzzle. Too few dots and the cat has no tail. Too many and you cannot join them at all.
“We removed 80% and they started ranking for their core keywords again.”
Gert Mellak
He repeated it three months ago with a consultant carrying twenty years of content. They cut at least half and she came back on page one. His narrowing sequence is worth stealing whole: 1,600 articles, then what do you want to achieve, now 150, then who is your client, now 13, then what has worked in Google Ads, now 5. Go deep on those five.
8. Ask every client what data they are about to delete
He asks new clients what they collect and never read. Usually it is feedback forms.
“We have clients who come with 5,000 feedback forms filled in, where clients put half a page of description why they are actually reaching out, what their problem is, what their pain point is, how they talk about it. For us, this is gold. And clients are about to delete it because it takes up so much space on their computer.”
Gert Mellak
Five thousand customers describing their own problem in their own words beats any keyword tool for finding the language to write in. He also asks for a seat on the CRM, and does audience research with tools like SparkToro.
The frame behind all of it
Gert’s framework starts from a thought experiment: “Imagine you do SEO, but search engines don’t exist.” Find the audience, join their conversations, get into the publications that already have them, build distribution, and only then write. He calls it the Search Everywhere Optimization Pyramid and the full version is on Search Engine Land.
“Now bring search engines back,” he said. “You have done exactly what you need to do in 2026 in order to rank well.”
He is at gertmellak.com, on LinkedIn, and writing at his blog.
Listen to the full episode on the Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast.