Traffic up again, and this time the orders followed.

One note on timing. Ben was away for three weeks through the back half of September, so this report lands in October rather than at the start of the month. He is back on the ground now and has written this one himself.

The month at a glance

Click-through rate is the share of the people who saw you in the results who actually came through. It went up at the same time as impressions went up, which is the combination you want. Being shown more often usually pushes that rate down, because the extra appearances tend to sit further down the page. Here you were shown 3,004 more times and still converted a slightly higher share of them.

August's report showed three months of gains in a row on all four of these measures. September makes it four. The three earlier months are the ones published in that report.

Two basis notes so the columns above can be checked against last month's page. Search Console revises recent months upward as its data settles, so August reads 723 clicks and 38,750 impressions in this pull against the 690 and 37,460 published in August's tab. And the organic figure here counts visits, where August's tab quoted 658 on a visitor basis, which is a different measure of the same month. Both columns above come from the same pull on 12 October, so the comparison between them holds.

What organic search is worth to you

August's report had one number that went the wrong way: organic revenue was the weakest month of the window, on the best traffic since December. September is the direct answer to that.

Organic revenue is up 162.7% on August, and the lift came from both halves of the sum rather than one. Orders went from 13 to 22, up 69.2%. Average order value went from A$97.69 to A$151.67, up 55.3%. Multiply those two together and you get the 163%. So more people bought, and the ones who bought spent more. That is a better month than either number on its own would suggest.

The percentage is bigger than the story though. Nine extra orders moved that figure. On a base of 13 orders, nine more is a 163% revenue jump; on a base of 130 orders it would have been a rounding error. One good month on numbers this small is encouraging rather than proof of anything, and we would want to see October and November hold a similar shape before calling it a trend.

Some of the lift is the season. You sell towels, beach mats and beach blankets in Australia, and September is the month the weather turns. Part of what happened here is the work and part of it is the calendar, and we cannot cleanly separate the two from this data.

Organic search now accounts for 85.0% of all the revenue the site tracks, from 56.9% in August, while bringing 951 of the 1,967 total visits. Under half the visits, most of the money. To be precise about what the revenue figure is and is not: it is what GA4 recorded rather than audited sales, it is gross revenue rather than margin, and it counts all organic revenue rather than only the part we moved.

Where the growth came from

Clicks, page by page, for the ten pages Google sent the most people to in September.

Those ten pages carried 605 of the month's 814 clicks. The four collection pages on that list went from 155 clicks to 252 between them, up 62.6%, and the four blog guides went from 67 to 86. The car seat towels collection was the single biggest mover again, up 48 clicks, and it was shown 5,609 times against 3,827 in August.

The homepage went the other way, down 46 clicks, and it went down while being shown more often: 10,113 times against 8,267. September itself has no brand-name split, so take the next line as a read of the page-level data rather than a measurement. The history up to August does have one, and it points the same way, which is further down this page. The homepage is usually the page that catches people typing your name, and the collection pages catch people describing the thing they want. The homepage lost 46 clicks and the collections gained 97. So the month's growth came from people describing a towel rather than people who already knew the brand, which is the direction the whole plan is pointed in. Every one of the thirty search terms we track is a generic category search with no brand name in it, so the rankings section below is all non-branded demand too.

The before and after, as promised

Ben said this report would carry a before-and-after view of Search Console, so here is September this year against September last year.

Clicks are up 12.6% on the same month last year, and that single number is two opposite things happening at once. The split is the real story.

Impressions are up 36.3%, so Google is putting you in front of Australian searchers a third more often than it was a year ago. The click-through rate went the other way, from 2.36% down to 1.95%. That is a fall of 0.41 points, or about 17% of the rate. Multiply a third more exposure by a click rate running at 83% of last year's and you land on the 12.6% more clicks you actually got.

The clearest way to see what that costs: had the click rate held at last September's 2.36%, this September's 41,754 impressions would have returned about 985 clicks rather than 814. Roughly 171 clicks went to the lower rate.

So year on year the honest read is more exposure at a lower click rate, rather than a straight 12.6% improvement. That is happening across the market as Google answers more questions on the results page itself, and this report has a direct measure of it a little further down: 14 of the 30 searches we checked had a Google AI answer sitting above the normal results. The rate does look to have turned, though. The 16-month history has it bottoming at 1.65% in June 2026 and rising in every month since, 1.75% in July and 1.84% in August on that history's basis, then 1.95% in September on the current pull.

Brand-name searches against the rest

The useful question underneath all of this is whether the growth comes from people who already know you or from people describing what they want. Search Console can answer that for the months it has been pulled for, which runs to August rather than September.

Non-branded searches have overtaken brand-name searches as the bigger share of the clicks Google names, 47% to 52% between September 2025 and August 2026, with brand-name searches going the other way from 53% to 48%. For an engagement whose whole job is to win people who have never heard of you, that is the direction you want, and it matches what the page-level data showed earlier: the homepage down, the collection pages up.

Both of those named click counts are lower than they were, and most of that is coverage rather than performance. Google named 400 of September 2025's clicks and only 289 of August 2026's, while the month totals barely moved. That is why the shares are the sound read here and the raw counts are not.

Non-branded impressions are the steadier figure, roughly flat at 21,814 then 22,200, while brand-name impressions fell from 373 to 227. Worth knowing where the rest of the exposure growth sits: of the 6,833 extra impressions between those two months, about 6,593 are in searches Google will not name at all. That is part of why we check live rankings separately rather than relying on this report alone.

Two limits on the table above, both of which matter. Google anonymises low-volume searches, so this split only covers the searches it names, and the percentages are shares of those named clicks rather than of every click. Read it as the direction of travel rather than a full accounting. A search counts as brand-name when the brand appears in the words typed, in any of its usual spellings. And the August figures here come from the 16-month history, where August reads 690 clicks against the 723 in the revised pull used at the top of this page, so compare the shares across months rather than reading these counts against the headline numbers.

Rankings, checked live

Checked on Google Australia on 12 October 2026, across the thirty terms we track. These are live positions in the actual results on the day of the check rather than an average pulled from a reporting tool.

This is the first month with a number one on the account, and the first with anything in the top three at all. August's check found seven terms on page one and none in the top three. Here is the page-one set:

The quick dry family is where the on-page work has landed. Six of the nine page-one terms are quick dry or travel towel searches, and that was the cluster the title and internal linking work was aimed at. The original strategy said you would expect movement on quick dry and hooded towel searches within four to eight weeks of that work. The quick dry half has arrived.

The hooded towel half has not arrived. Fourteen of the thirty terms did not appear at all on the day of the check, and nine of those fourteen are hooded towel searches. The other five were gym towels, microfibre gym towel, towel car seat cover, beach mats and beach blankets. Those hooded pages are the exact set the collection consolidation is built to fix, which is why August's report flagged the same cluster, and the fix is still the biggest one sitting on the table.

One comparison to hold loosely. August's check found 24 terms ranking somewhere against 16 this month, while page-one placements went from seven to nine. Both are single-day snapshots taken six weeks apart, so the drop in the wider count reflects the hooded towel terms falling out of the results rather than a broad slide. Climbing in the places that earn clicks while slipping in the places that never did is the trade we would take, and we are watching it either way.

On the AI answers. Fourteen of the thirty searches showed a Google AI answer above the normal results. The check records whether that box appeared, so we are not claiming you are named inside any of them. These boxes also come and go from day to day, so read the fourteen as a snapshot on 12 October rather than a precise score. Separately, GA4 recorded 32 visits that arrived from AI assistants in September, 30 of them from ChatGPT and 2 from Claude, against 25 in August. Small numbers, moving the right way, and worth tracking properly rather than celebrating yet.

Three things to keep in mind about this month

• The revenue jump sits on 22 orders. Nine extra orders produced a 163% figure. It is real money and a real improvement, and it is small enough that one quiet month would pull the percentage back hard. Treat it as a good month rather than a new baseline.
• The season is part of it. September into October is when Australians start buying beach gear. We would expect some tailwind in these numbers through to summer, and some payback after it.
• The hooded towel cluster is still unresolved. It is the largest group of terms you do not rank for, and the consolidation work is what it is waiting on.

Where things stand and what is next

• Ben is back. He was offline for three weeks in September and is back on the ground from this week, which is why this report arrives in October.
• Authority is holding up. Ahrefs reads your Domain Rating at 19, from 1,016 links across 749 referring domains, continuing the recovery reported in August. Monthly volume link building stays retired for the reasons set out in that report.
• The collection consolidation is still the next structural fix. It is what the hooded towel searches are waiting on, and the plan for it is on the consolidation tab.
• No new production has been committed. You said you would rather wait until Notable is ready and Ben is back on the ground before taking on new work, which is fair enough. Ben is back, so the next step is simply a walkthrough of Notable and its AI visibility tracking whenever it suits you.
• Every figure here is checkable. The underlying data sits in the sheet linked from this page, and Ben will show you the working behind any number you want to pull apart.