Been watching a couple of my affiliate sites this week and the traffic is acting a little strange.
One site is basically flat on average position, but CTR dropped hard on a few money pages. Another site actually picked up a bit of impressions but conversions are down, which makes zero sense at first glance. Same content, same internal links, same affiliate offers.
I’ve been testing a few things:
– rewriting titles to be less “SEO-y”
– adding more direct benefit wording in the meta
– tightening up intro paragraphs so they answer intent faster
– swapping a couple of affiliate buttons above the fold
The weird part is that some pages with AI-assisted content are holding fine, while a few older hand-written pages took the hit. Could just be noise, but it feels like Google is rewarding clearer intent match more than ever.
Anyone else seeing:
– CTR drops without big ranking changes?
– affiliate pages getting more impressions but fewer clicks?
– better results from simpler title tags vs fancy keyword-stuffed ones?
Curious what’s actually working for people right now. I’m trying to keep it practical and not overthink it.