Why informational pages don't bring in patients

The context

The website of an eye clinic we worked on looked like this: a handful of commercial pages, and on top of them a library of informational articles: what cataracts are, symptoms of vitreous detachment, what floaters are. Well-written content that generates a remarkable volume of impressions.

The problem is that those impressions come from all over Italy, from people who have a question, not a problem to solve with an appointment. Someone searching for “vitreous detachment” in Palermo at eleven at night is never going to book at a clinic in Turin.

The test

We left the existing informational layer untouched and added a small set of pages built on the opposite principle: one procedure, one city, one intent to book. Five pages, with the city name in the URL.

None of them got links, budget or any special push. They’re ordinary pages, published and left to do their job.

After a few weeks, the site’s performance by segment looked like this:

Page type	Clicks per 1,000 impressions
National informational (conditions)	3.0
Treatment pages	12.4
Local commercial pages	16.4

The five local pages accounted for 1.6% of the site’s impressions and 3.6% of its clicks.

The comparison that matters

Segment averages can always be challenged: different positions, different queries, seasonality. That’s why the figure we focus on is a different one: a comparison between two individual pages that sat at almost the same spot in the SERP.

	Average position	CTR
National informational page (condition)	8.97	0.34%
Local commercial page (procedure + city)	8.37	1.66%

Half a position apart. Five times the clicks.

This rules out the most common objection, namely that local pages work because they rank higher. They didn’t rank higher. They were showing up in front of different people.

When someone looks for a definition and finds a list of ten equivalent definitions, they pick one at random or don’t click at all. When they look for a procedure in their city and find a clinic that performs it, the click has a reason.

Informational traffic isn’t even stable

There’s a second part to the story, and it’s the one that changed our priorities.

Comparing two consecutive 28-day periods, the site as a whole looked flat: clicks were down just 2%. Under the surface, something very different was happening.

• Total impressions: -13%
• Informational pages: -40% clicks
• A single informational page: -62% clicks, with impressions down 51%
• Local commercial pages: +69% clicks, with impressions more than doubled (+146%)
• Site CTR: from 0.74% to 0.84%

Informational traffic was deflating on its own, without anyone touching it. The local pages were filling the gap. The total stayed flat, but the quality of what was coming in had changed, and the rising site CTR shows it.

That’s why we no longer treat the shift toward local commercial pages as one priority among many. Generic traffic from people looking for answers to general questions is the first to evaporate, and sites that rely on it for their organic traffic end up without a base, without having decided anything.

What these numbers don’t prove

Five pages is a small number and the volumes are small. Four of the five were only a few weeks old, and over such a short window the variance is high. The set needed to be watched for a few more months before we could call it a result.

What the numbers do prove is narrower, and still enough: at the same SERP position, the same amount of visibility produces five times the clicks when the page is built on the right intent. That’s a clean figure, and it doesn’t depend on how old the pages are.

How we apply it

The way we use this in our website growth work comes down to a couple of habits.

We look at clicks per thousand impressions, by segment, not total clicks. The total hides the trade-offs. A flat site can be a site that’s losing useless traffic and gaining good traffic, or the exact opposite, and the two cases call for opposite decisions.

Before writing a page, we ask who will find it and from where. If the answer is “anyone in Italy with this symptom”, that page may make sense for authority or to support other pages, but it shouldn’t be counted among the ones that bring in clients.

In short

A site can get a huge number of impressions a month and be almost useless to its owner. The question isn’t how much visibility you have, but in front of whom.

If you have a site with lots of informational traffic and few contact requests, comparing clicks per thousand impressions across your segments will tell you in ten minutes.