One Month into English Articles, and Zero Growth
Last month, I started adding English articles to my blog.
I'd been writing exclusively in Japanese, and I wanted to see if I could reach an English-speaking audience too. But after about a month, the pageviews from English-speaking regions hadn't budged at all.
"Maybe it just takes time," I told myself — but there was something that felt a lot like anxiety underneath.
The First Hypothesis: Volume Should Compensate
The first idea that came to mind went something like this:
"English search volume is tens of times larger than Japanese, so even if my ranking is a bit lower, I should still get comparable pageviews in relative terms."
The logic didn't seem bad. If the market is bigger, even a small share should produce decent numbers.
But when I actually ran the numbers, the logic fell apart.
For example: if a Japanese keyword has 1,000 monthly searches and I'm ranked #1 (CTR ~30%), that's 300 pageviews. An English keyword with 10,000 monthly searches but ranked #20 (CTR ~0.5%) gives me just 50 pageviews. These are hypothetical numbers, but the structure is real.
Even with 10x the volume, dropping to page two creates this kind of reversal.
CTR changes dramatically with ranking position. #1 gets about 30%, #3 about 10%, #10 about 2-3%, and page two drops below 1%. I knew this as factual knowledge — yet until I applied it to my own data, I kept holding onto the comfortable assumption that "volume will compensate."
Assumptions have a way of hiding quietly in places like this.
Suspecting a Technical Issue
Next, I suspected an indexing problem.
When a blog uses SPA architecture (where content is rendered dynamically via JavaScript), Google's crawler sometimes can't read the page content, leaving it unindexed. If a page doesn't appear in search results, no amount of good writing matters.
I checked the URL in Google Search Console.
"URL is on Google." "Page is indexed."
It wasn't a technical problem. One question down.
What Hides Behind an Average Ranking
The next number that caught my eye was average search position: 6.3.
Honestly, not bad at all. That's the middle of page one. And yet, pageviews weren't growing.
The assumption that "good ranking should mean good traffic" started to wobble here.
But an average is just an average. When I looked at individual articles, there was naturally a wide spread. I needed to see what was hiding behind that 6.3.
So I looked at my articles through three lenses:
- High impressions but low CTR
- Low impressions but high CTR
- Somewhere in between
"High impressions × low CTR" articles suggest a mismatch between the title and search intent. However, if the ranking is 8-10, it might just be the position — not necessarily a title problem. That's why you need to look at ranking alongside CTR, or you'll misdiagnose.
"Low impressions × high CTR" articles are niche but hitting the mark perfectly. For articles like these, building related content around the same theme can lift the entire topic cluster.
And the most interesting zone was "moderate impressions × low CTR × ranking 4-10".
These are articles where just fixing the title and meta description could change the click count. No need to rewrite the content itself. Maximum improvement with minimum effort.
"There are a few articles that are almost there."
In that moment, the anxiety shifted just a little — into something that felt more like traction.
Less Analysis, More Questioning
Looking back, what I was doing wasn't really "analyzing data." It was closer to asking questions.
- Why aren't pageviews growing?
- Is it a technical problem or a content problem?
- If the ranking isn't bad, why aren't people clicking?
- What distribution is hiding behind the average?
- Which articles are in the "almost there" zone?
When you approach numbers with a question, the next question emerges. Through that chain, the bottleneck gradually narrows.
This felt remarkably similar to the process of introspection.
Rather than jumping straight to "What am I feeling?", you start with "What are the facts?" and then carefully untangle "How am I interpreting those facts?"
Whether you're looking at numbers or looking inward, the structure is probably the same.
The Quality of Your Questions Changes What You See
Here's what I took away from this experience.
When all you have is a vague question like "Why isn't it growing?", numbers are just a list. It's only when you sharpen the question — "Is it a technical issue or a content issue?" "Is it ranking, CTR, or volume?" — that the numbers start to speak.
When you sit down in front of the numbers, what's the first question you ask?