LearningLeader.com is Ryan Hawk's leadership podcast: 700 plus episodes and a decade of guests. We spent 24 hours in July fixing how Google reads the site. Four months on, it gets nearly twice the visits from Google it got before, his book launch is long over, and most of those visits come from people who were not searching for him.
Client
Ryan Hawk, The Learning Leader Show
Work shipped
July 9 to 13, and September 23, 2026
Measured through
November 2, 2026
Source
His own Google Search Console
The result
Visits from Google per day
51→97
+91%
Times Google showed the site per day
9,560→19,499
+104%
Visits from searches not for Ryan
8→35
+340%
Times shown for searches not for Ryan
3,515→11,956
+240%
Daily averages. Before is June 29 to July 8, the ten days of history that exist prior to the work. After is August 3 to November 2, thirteen weeks that start once the July 21 book launch spike had passed. "Not for Ryan" means every search that is not his name, the show's name, or the title of either of his books.
Times Google showed the site per day, as a seven-day average. Green marks the week the July work went live and the day the 612 back-catalogue pages were retitled. Clay is the book launch. The launch made no lasting spike. The rise came after the work, peaked in late September, and eased through October. On November 2 it was still about 30% above where it started.
The October dip
October was quieter, and Google ranked the site higher
Visits fell about 11% from September to October. Fewer people searched the topics his episodes cover, while Google placed his pages higher than it had all summer.
Per day
Before
Aug
Sep
Oct
Visits from Google
51
101
101
90
Times Google showed the site
9,560
19,158
22,827
16,886
His pages sit higher in Google's results than they did in August. The average place moved from 9.2 in August to 8.4 in the last week of October.
What fell was demand. The visits lost from September to October are spread across guest searches that peaked in September (Oz Pearlman, Chris Borland, Brent Underwood) and the Aron Ralston episode coming down from its September high.
Searches for Ryan himself are back below where they started. 11 visits a day before the work, 10 a day in the last four weeks. The book has worn off and visits are still 70% above where they started.
The September work
The 612 pages we retitled lost the least
On September 23 we gave every older episode page its own title and description in Google, written from Ryan's show notes. 612 had nothing of their own, and 229 of those showed searchers a text-to-join number, a Stitcher link or a pre-order that no longer existed. Through October those pages held their visits while the rest of the site fell.
Visits per day, the four weeks before the retitles (August 25 to September 22) against the four weeks ending November 2. The site's general-learning page, described below, is left out of all three rows.
The 612 retitled pages
Before
After
Visits per day
16.2
15.6
Share of showings that became a visit
0.46%
0.52%
Average place in Google's results
11.2
10.2
More of the people who saw these pages clicked, and Google placed them a full spot higher.
The clean proof
One page, one redirect, 31 times the visits
Episode 537 is Aron Ralston, the hiker from 127 Hours who cut off his own arm. It existed at two addresses, one of 543 duplicate pairs on the site. We pointed the duplicate at the real page and changed nothing else about it.
The searches are aron ralston, 127 hours real guy, 127 hours true story. None of them is about a leadership book.
It has not faded. In the last four weeks it still averaged 23.4 visits a day.
The mechanism
Google shows fewer of his pages and sends more people
Before the work, Google spread its attention across duplicate copies of the same episodes. After, it shows the real episode page, the one with the player, the show notes and the links to the next episode.
Ten-day window
Before
Late Aug
Late Oct
Addresses Google showed
915
785
775
Times Google showed them
101,165
209,994
153,111
Share on the real episode pages
18%
62%
58%
Four months on, the consolidation has held. The October quiet shows mostly in the middle row.
The work
What we changed
All of it reversible, and none of it changed what his listeners see on an episode.
July 9 to 13, 24 hours
543 duplicate episode addresses consolidated to one clean address each.
545 older episodes given a real headline. They had none, so Google was inventing one.
Machine-readable details for Ryan, the show and every episode, updating themselves as he publishes.
74 high-value pages given new titles and descriptions in Google.
266 "keep listening" links across 51 pages, so a reader who finds one episode finds the next.
A searchable all-episodes page at /episodes/, updating itself.
A safe speed pass. Image compression, caching and a font fix.
September 23
612 back-catalogue episodes given their own title and description in Google, each from his show notes, in four reviewed batches.
Guests who now bring their own audience
Searches that sent Ryan nobody in the ten days before the work, and what they have sent since, July 14 to November 2:
Search
Visits before
Visits since
jack raines
0
56
chris borland
0
38
jesse itzler net worth
0
29
matt eversmann
0
27
maurice clarett
0
26
will guidara
0
16
Where we are honest
What this does not prove
The baseline is ten days. Ryan's Search Console starts on June 29 and Google does not fill in history before that. It also means there is no last October to compare this October with, so we cannot say how much of the dip is the season.
One episode carries a quarter of it. The Ralston page is 25% of the visits since August 3. Take it out, along with the general-learning page below, and the rest of the site is still up 45% on visits and 46% on times shown.
Part of the reach is noise. Since September his /podcast/ page has been showing for general searches about learning, such as machine learning. Those showings roughly halved from September to October. They stay in the totals at the top because that is what Search Console reports. Without them, times shown are up 83% instead of 104%.
The retitle comparison is four weeks either side and not a controlled test. The retitled pages are older episodes, which may simply be steadier. It is the best comparison the data allows.
Famous guest names still do not bring visits. His episode with Katie Gatti Tassin sits at an average place of 1.7 in Google for her name. It was shown 465 times in the last four weeks and nobody clicked. Most of those people are probably looking for her, not an interview with her.
We report the work delivered and the measured change, never predicted rankings. Search results move for reasons no agency controls.
How we measure
The same four rules on every site
Everything above comes out of one place, and none of it is our own dashboard.
Your Search Console, not our tool. You own it, you see the same numbers we do, and you can check any figure on this page yourself.
A before window we locked before touching anything. Whatever the site was doing in the weeks before the work is the line we are measured against.
Searches for your own name split out from the rest. Those were coming anyway. The number that counts is people who found you without knowing you existed.
A one-page report every month, including what it cannot prove. What we changed, what those pages did next, and the parts that moved for reasons we did not cause. Then a call to go through it together.
Since then
What we have shipped since
His newsletter archive, on his own site. 43 past issues of Mindful Monday now live at learningleader.com/mindfulmonday/issues/, each its own page Google can find on his domain rather than his email platform's.
A faster newsletter signup page. Google's phone speed score for it went from 66 to 91.
One signup form where there were two. Episode pages showed the free-chapters form twice, and the book popup opened twice. Both now appear once.