MOJO Creative Digital — May 2026 Client SEO Benchmark Report
By Cara Bunda • June 7, 2026 • Digital Marketing
Category
By Cara Bunda • June 7, 2026 • Digital Marketing
By Cara Bunda • June 7, 2026 • News, Digital Marketing
Every month, MOJO delivers in-depth KPI reports to every client we work with. We dig through Google Analytics, Search Console, and campaign data to surface what's working, what needs attention, and where the real opportunity lives. We do this because we believe transparency isn't a differentiator — it's a baseline. Our clients deserve to see exactly what their investment is producing.
This report is something different. It's our own internal lens turned outward — a look across our full client stack as of May 2026 to identify the trends, patterns, and signals that cut across industries, audience sizes, and business types. What are we seeing in aggregate? What does the data reveal about how organic search is behaving right now? And what should businesses be paying attention to as we move into the back half of the year?
If you read our April 2026 benchmark report, you'll recognize the shape of this one — and that's intentional. The whole point of a monthly benchmark is the trend line. April told us rankings were climbing across the portfolio and the next phase of work was converting those rankings into clicks. May, in large part, is the story of that second phase playing out: some clients broke through onto page one and saw clicks surge, while others ran headfirst into the structural reality of the 2026 SERP, where ranking and getting clicked are no longer the same thing.
Here's what May told us.
Across the portfolio, May was a month of contrasts. Several clients posted breakout months — clean, compounding growth across clicks, impressions, and rankings all at once. Others saw softer clicks even as impressions held or grew, which is exactly the pattern the 2026 search environment produces. The most useful read isn't any single number; it's the spread, and what the spread tells us about where organic search rewards effort right now.
Here are the standout signals from across the portfolio in May:
Visit Maryland: 127,662 clicks, up 8% MoM, on 17.5M impressions. The largest site in our portfolio capped three straight months of growth (107K → 118K → 127K clicks), with average position holding steady around 9. The story of the month was seasonal content firing precisely on cue: the Memorial Day guide jumped from 346 clicks in April to 3,556 in May — more than a tenfold increase — landing right when travelers were planning the long weekend. Fleet Week nearly doubled to 2,586 clicks at a 4.65% CTR, and the "strawberry festival maryland" search more than doubled (163 → 402 clicks). Mobile carried the majority of the traffic (87,893 clicks), which fits travel-planning behavior perfectly.
Fello: 5,634 clicks, up 4% MoM, on 92,000+ impressions. Fello posted its strongest click month of the quarter, and impressions jumped 52%. The standout was mission-relevant advocacy content reaching the community when it counted: the "What You Need to Know About the 2026 Maryland Legislative Session" page jumped from 62 clicks in April to 261 in May, ranking page one at position 4.6, while the "Understanding Maryland's Proposed DDA Budget Cuts" page grew from 11 to 71 clicks. The Self-Directed Services page earned 933 clicks at an 11.04% CTR.
Mabrey Law: 436 clicks, up 24% MoM — and onto page one. A breakout month. Clicks climbed from April's 353, and average ranking position jumped from 17.1 all the way to 9.3 — crossing the single most important threshold in search. On desktop the improvement was sharper still, from 24.3 to 7.5. The suspended-license content is now a real traffic engine: the flagship "What Happens If You Drive on a Suspended License in Maryland" piece nearly doubled from 40 to 79 clicks, and newer pages went from zero to real traffic in a single month ("What Happens If You Miss a Court Date in Maryland" — 0 to 28 clicks at position 6.2). The Chestertown office page leapt from position 71.9 to 8.3.
Pine Creek Structures: 385 clicks, up 89% MoM — clicks nearly doubled for the third straight month. May was a breakout. Impressions climbed 85% to roughly 40,000, and average position improved from 13.8 onto page one at 10.3 — every key metric moving up sharply at once. The shed-permit content became a genuine powerhouse: the "Do You Need a Permit to Build a Shed in Maryland: A County-by-County Guide" pulled 207 clicks at position 6.0 — nearly as many as the entire homepage. That guide has spawned a winning cluster of county-level pages (Montgomery, Baltimore, Anne Arundel) all ranking on page one. Top searches are overwhelmingly non-brand — "sheds millersville md," "amish sheds maryland," "shed permit montgomery county" — meaning the growth is coming from brand-new customers.
MOJO (mojo.biz): 296 clicks, up 24% MoM — our own best month of the quarter. More on our own site below, but the headline is that our content engine is clearly firing.
Sanford & Son (Coins & Collectibles): 267 clicks, up 16% MoM. Three straight months of rising clicks (207 → 231 → 267), with impressions up 24% to 6,833. The "What to Know About Antique Buyers Who Come to Your House" page is the hardest-working asset on the site — 75 clicks at a 6.93% CTR from position 4.5. The whole "antique buyers who come to your home" theme is the clear winner, with related searches ranking top 3–5 and converting above 14%. The mobile story is striking: 203 of 267 clicks came from mobile, at an average position of 7.4.
Scardina Home Services: 170 clicks, up 10% MoM, on 29,799 impressions (up 40%). Average position improved from 20.8 to 18.4. New blog content worked immediately: the "What Does a Plumbing Inspection Actually Check" guide launched straight to 13 clicks on page one at position 7.2, pulling nearly 2,800 impressions in its first month. Several other fresh posts went from zero to real traffic, and the "What Causes a Shower to Lose Hot Water" post leapt from position 52 onto page one at 10.8.
ITS (Interactive Touchscreen Solutions): 292 clicks, essentially flat (-5% MoM) on 125,011 impressions. On an account this size, that's a stable month on the back of a strong spring. The Digital Signage Cost guide pulled an enormous 43,042 impressions over the quarter — the most of any page — and ranks page one at position 7.2. The Navigo product pages continue pulling their weight, with elevator screens (11,621 impressions) and digital building directories (19,149 impressions) showing clear room to climb.
Estate Specialist: a baseline month — 131 clicks, 54,355 impressions. We connected Search Console for this site on May 3rd, so this is the clean first picture rather than a month-over-month. The blog content is already strong: "What Do You Do With Inherited Antiques, Collectibles & Other Belongings" led all pages with 34 clicks at a 2.87% CTR from position 5.9. The clearest opportunity is the gap between content (ranking and converting) and service pages — "bereavement cleanout services" generated 7,446 impressions but the page it points to converts at a fraction of a percent.
Fello Communities: 298 clicks, down from 435 in April — a softer month, but page-one stable. Average position held on page one at 8.2, and individual development pages kept converting strongly: The Laura House earned 195 clicks at an exceptional 21% CTR, with Easton Crossing (138 clicks) and Port Street Commons (102 clicks) close behind. The softness is a visibility-and-content issue, not a structural one: the site is excellent at serving people who already know the projects, and the Silo Square page (2,000+ impressions stuck at position 40) is a concrete fixable win.
Beal Industrial Products: 57 clicks, down from 86 in April. The honest read — a softer month, driven by average position slipping from 20.4 to 24.1. The core story is structural: brand terms convert beautifully but only reach people who already know Beal, while high-value non-brand terms ("industrial battery," "battery spill kit," "forklift charging station") pull real impression volume but sit in the high 20s to 50s. The bright spots are upward movement where it matters — "industrial battery" climbed from position 52 to 30, and the opportunity-charging article holds page one at position 7.4.
Systcom: 141 clicks, down 12% MoM, on 49,493 impressions (up 4%). Remarkable stability across the quarter (164 → 160 → 141 clicks) with impressions holding strong. The dip traces almost entirely to average position softening from 16.4 to 19.3. The low-voltage cabling guide remains the standout — 22,338 impressions over the quarter at position 7.4. The Careers page converts at a 1.74% CTR from position 4.4, and the server-room organization article sits at position 10.6, right on the edge of page one.
The Bank of Glen Burnie: 7,203 total users, essentially flat, with organic softening ~7–9%. This account reports on Google Analytics (sessions, users, engagement) rather than Search Console. Site-wide traffic held steady because Direct grew to pick up the slack, but organic gave back some ground after a stronger April. Some of that is Memorial Day timing — a pattern we saw across multiple accounts — but we're treating the organic dip as something to actively diagnose rather than chalk up to the calendar.
Maryland Curbscape: 33 clicks, up 43% MoM, on 1,062 impressions (up 39%). May was the strongest month of the quarter on both clicks and impressions. The homepage anchors the account (66 clicks at a 6.67% CTR), and the "HOA-approved concrete upgrade" article converts at a striking 4.88% from page one. The opportunity is the same one many local clients share: non-brand searches ("curbing contractor," "stamped concrete Annapolis," dozens of "near me" queries) generate 1,300+ impressions but rank deep on pages 5–9.
Toll Talk: 22 clicks, up from 17, on 2,071 impressions. Modest absolute numbers for a niche podcast, but moving the right way, with an excellent CTR (homepage at 4.5%). The impression swing from April (6,735) to May (2,071) traces almost entirely to one news-pegged article — the NYC congestion-pricing piece — that caught a wave of timely interest in April and naturally cooled. Strip it out and the rest of the site held steady. The lesson is strategic: timely, news-pegged content is the lever for a niche show.
The Diligent Leader: 7 clicks, up from 5, on 124 impressions. Early-stage numbers for a new site, exactly as expected, with the encouraging signal that it's ranking page one for its name out of the gate (position 8.5). The search "diligent leadership" is already generating visibility (76 impressions at position 11.5) with no dedicated page yet — a clear content opportunity. The growth lever here is straightforward: feed a strong single landing page with content.
Looking across the full client stack, several patterns repeat with enough consistency to name as trends. As in April, these aren't hunches — they're what the data is actually telling us across industries as different as tourism, law, disability services, storage sheds, industrial equipment, and community banking.
The single most important thing to understand about May is a pattern that appeared, in some form, on a majority of our accounts: a site's impressions hold steady or grow, its rankings hold or improve — and yet clicks stay flat or dip. Beal, Systcom, ITS, Fello Communities, and the Bank of Glen Burnie all showed a version of this. It looks like a contradiction. It isn't. It's the defining feature of the 2026 search results page.
The mechanism is the AI Overview. In a February 2026 study, Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords — half with AI Overviews present, half without — and found that AI Overviews correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rate for top-ranking pages. Position 2 saw a 50.8% drop and position 3 a 46.4% drop, with the effect shrinking further down the page. Or as the study's authors put it: for every 100 clicks a top-ranking page could historically earn, Google now keeps 58. (Outerbox / Ahrefs, 2026)
The zero-click trend compounds it. By late 2025, roughly 56% of U.S. Google searches on desktop ended without a click, with mobile running far higher — some studies put mobile zero-click rates at 77%. (SparkToro / Datos via Indexsy, 2026)
This is exactly why we keep pointing clients to clicks and rankings as the truer measures and treating raw impressions with caution. When ITS pulls 125,000 impressions for 292 clicks, or Visit Maryland's "maryland" query throws off over a million impressions with almost no clicks, that's not underperformance — it's the AI Overview answering the query before anyone scrolls. The practical implication hasn't changed since April, but it's gotten more urgent: CTR optimization — title tags, meta descriptions, structured data, and content that earns the click an AI Overview is trying to prevent — is now the highest-leverage work in SEO.
For all the talk of a shifting SERP, the oldest rule in search held firm in May, and the clearest proof is Mabrey Law. The firm's average position jumped from 17.1 to 9.3 — and clicks rose 24% in the same month. That's not a coincidence; it's cause and effect. Page two is, functionally, invisible.
The math behind that threshold is stark. The top three organic results capture roughly 68.7% of all clicks on the page, and dropping from position #1 to position #3 alone costs nearly 30 percentage points of CTR. (First Page Sage, 2026) Pine Creek (13.8 → 10.3) and Scardina ("Shower to Lose Hot Water" leaping from position 52 to 10.8) tell the same story from different industries. When a page crosses onto page one, the impressions it was already accumulating finally start converting into traffic.
This is the flip side of Trend 1, and the two together define the strategy: AI Overviews are compressing CTR at every position, which makes the difference between page two and page one matter more than ever. The pages stuck at positions 12–25 across our portfolio — Beal's non-brand category terms, Curbscape's "near me" searches, Fello Communities' Silo Square page — aren't failing. They're one ranking push away from where the clicks actually live.
If Trend 1 is the headwind, this is the most dependable tailwind. May made it unmistakable. Visit Maryland's Memorial Day guide went from 346 to 3,556 clicks by landing right in the long-weekend planning window. Fello's legislative-session and DDA-budget advocacy pages surged (62 → 261 clicks) because they reached the community at the exact moment policy news made them relevant. Toll Talk's entire impression profile swings on a single news-pegged congestion-pricing article. And — as we'll cover below — our own breakout piece this month was a timely take on the AI backlash.
The industry data backs the instinct: compound, evergreen-and-timely posts generate a disproportionate share of all blog traffic relative to how few of them exist, and the most effective 2026 teams pair an evergreen library with the "velocity" to capture demand while it's still spiking. (HubSpot via Searchlab, 2026) Seasonal relevance isn't a soft content principle — across our portfolio in May, it was the single most consistent driver of outsized click numbers.
The mobile-CTR gap we flagged in April didn't just persist in May; it deepened on several accounts. Sanford & Son drew 203 of its 267 clicks from mobile, at an average mobile position of 7.4. Visit Maryland pulled the majority of its 127,662 clicks from mobile (87,893). For local and high-intent service searches especially, the phone is where the deliberate clicks happen.
The logic is the same one driving zero-click behavior: mobile results are the most aggressively answered by AI Overviews and snippets, so the clicks that do happen on mobile are more intentional, more high-intent, and more likely to convert. The practical implication is unchanged but worth repeating: any business not actively optimizing for mobile speed, click-to-call, and mobile UX is leaving qualified inquiries on the table — and in 2026 that gap is widening, not closing.
A theme that ran quietly through nearly every account this month: when a site's traffic depends heavily on brand searches, it's both a strength and a tell. Beal, Maryland Curbscape, and Fello Communities all convert their brand and project-name terms beautifully — Fello Communities' development pages hit 21% CTR — but lean almost entirely on people who already know them. The growth path for each is the same: extend reach to people searching the category, not the name.
The encouraging flip side is that brand health is strengthening where the content engine is firing. MOJO's own "mojo creative digital" searches nearly tripled their clicks (17 → 44) and jumped from position 33 to about 15 — a direct downstream effect of content getting in front of new audiences. This matters more every quarter: as AI Overviews suppress CTR on generic queries, content marketing's compounding economics increasingly accrue to recognizable brands, because content assets keep producing returns for years after publication while paid stops the moment spend stops. (DigitalApplied, 2026) A strong brand is the most durable asset a site can hold in an AI-first SERP.
One genuinely encouraging signal cut across the portfolio: freshly published content is landing fast. Scardina's plumbing-inspection guide launched straight to position 7.2 in its first month. Mabrey's "Miss a Court Date" page went 0 → 28 clicks in a single month. MOJO's "Why 58% of Google Searches Never Click Anything" went 0 → 7 clicks onto page one immediately. This is the compounding effect of an established, topically-authoritative site — when the domain has earned trust, new pages on familiar themes inherit a head start.
This is consistent with the broader finding that organic content delivers compounding returns, with the bulk of an asset's lifetime results arriving after the first few months, and that refreshing or expanding existing high-intent pages can lift organic traffic substantially without adding publishing volume. (NewMedia, 2026) The takeaway for our clients: the investment made in Q1 is what's producing these fast-landing pages now, and the library compounds.
As in April, the accounts where we can have the sharpest ROI conversations are the ones with the cleanest measurement — Visit Maryland, Fello, Pine Creek. And the recurring gap is just as real: several clients still have meaningful events (form submissions, click-to-call, application starts) tracked as activity but not configured as formal GA4 conversions, which leaves the data telling an incomplete story. The Bank of Glen Burnie's organic dip, for instance, is harder to fully diagnose without conversion events configured on its key banking actions. Measurement infrastructure isn't a reporting nicety; it's the foundation for every decision about where to invest next.
Several threads from May point directly at where we'll be focused this summer.
The CTR-recovery frontier. This was the top priority in April, and May only sharpened it. With AI Overviews demonstrably keeping more than half the clicks on top-ranked pages, the next leg of growth for nearly every client runs through earning the click, not just the ranking. Beal's category terms, Systcom's service pages, ITS's high-impression cost guide, Curbscape's "near me" searches — these are all ranking assets that need conversion work: title tags written as conversion copy, structured data, and content built to answer the implicit question the AI Overview is trying to satisfy.
Lifting non-brand and service pages out of the teens-to-fifties. The clearest single opportunity across the portfolio is the cluster of pages sitting at positions 12–50 that pull real impressions but few clicks: Beal's "industrial battery suppliers" (climbing, 86 → 57), Fello Communities' Silo Square (2,000+ impressions at position 40), Estate Specialist's "bereavement cleanout services" page (7,446 impressions, near-zero conversion), and MOJO's own core service pages. Each one is a concrete, nameable target where a single push converts existing visibility into traffic.
Local service-area content as a growth lever. Multiple clients are sitting on untapped local search that a single dedicated page could capture — Maryland Curbscape's deep-ranking "near me" and town-specific queries are the clearest example. For local and regional service businesses, hyper-local content remains one of the highest-leverage investments available.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) as a parallel discipline. Our own AI-discoverability content keeps performing — the "How to Get Your Business Cited in Claude" piece holds page one at position 7.2 — and it's an early, meaningful signal that optimizing for AI answer engines, not just Google's blue links, is becoming its own discipline alongside traditional SEO. We're investing in that conversation for our clients and for ourselves.
Last month we owned the cobbler's-shoes reality openly: April was a mixed month for mojo.biz, with strong engagement but traffic down nearly 5%. May was the rebound. Clicks climbed to 296, up about 24% from April's 239 — our best month of the quarter — capping three straight months of growth in both clicks and impressions.
The standout was a piece of timely content doing exactly what we tell clients timely content can do. Our "Anti-AI Backlash" article went from 6 clicks in April to 50 in May — an eightfold jump — and now ranks page one at position 6.4. A single sharp, well-timed point of view broke out and pulled in a wave of new readers. That's the proof of concept for the thing we sell, working on our own site. Our AI/search-trends content lane is clearly the right bet: the "Why 58% of Google Searches Never Click Anything" and Claude-citation pieces are both holding page-one spots, and our brand searches strengthened in step (more people are now searching "mojo creative digital" by name).
The honest challenge is the same one we named in April and the same one many of our clients face: our core service pages — website design, digital marketing — still rank deep (in the 40s) on brutally competitive national terms, racking up enormous impressions but few clicks. That's not where our traffic comes from today, but it's where the next leg of growth lives. We're treating our own service-page rankings as a client engagement — exactly the discipline we'd bring to yours.
The KPI data in this report is drawn from Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console for all active client websites managed by MOJO Creative Digital as of May 2026. Month-over-month comparisons reference April 2026 figures, and the three-month trend analysis covers the March through May 2026 window. The Estate Specialist figures represent a partial-month baseline (Search Console connected May 3rd), and the Bank of Glen Burnie figures are drawn from Google Analytics rather than Search Console.
External statistics and SEO trend context are drawn from current industry research, including First Page Sage's 2026 CTR-by-position report, Ahrefs' AI Overview CTR study via Outerbox, Indexsy's 2026 CTR statistics (citing SparkToro/Datos zero-click data), and content-marketing ROI research from NewMedia, Searchlab, and DigitalApplied. Where research is cited, it reflects the most current publicly available data as of June 2026.
Client names are included with general performance context. No proprietary business data, contact information, or personally identifiable information is disclosed. This report reflects patterns observed across the MOJO client portfolio and is intended as an industry benchmark resource.
Every MOJO client receives a monthly KPI report with this level of depth — customized to their specific goals, industry, and performance baseline. If you're working with an agency that isn't showing you numbers like these, or if you're managing digital marketing in-house and want to understand how your SEO performance compares across your industry, we'd be glad to talk.
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MOJO is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB).
This is the defining pattern of the 2026 search results page, and it's not a performance failure. Google's AI Overviews now answer many queries directly at the top of the page, so a site can rank well and be shown to more people while fewer of them click through. Industry research found AI Overviews correlate with a 58% CTR reduction for top-ranking pages, and the majority of U.S. searches now end without any click. The work this creates is click-through-rate optimization: making your result compelling enough to earn the click an AI Overview is trying to prevent.
Two stand out. Mabrey Law crossed from page two onto page one (average position 17.1 → 9.3) and saw clicks rise 24% in the same month — a textbook demonstration of why the page-one threshold matters. And Pine Creek Structures nearly doubled clicks for the third consecutive month, riding a shed-permit content cluster that now owns its niche in Maryland.
The three-month view tells the real story. Across the portfolio this quarter, the clients seeing breakout May numbers — Mabrey, Pine Creek, MOJO's own site — are the ones whose Q1 content investment is now maturing into page-one rankings. New content is landing faster than old timelines predicted on established sites, but the compounding happens over quarters, not weeks.
Mobile results are the most heavily answered by AI Overviews and snippets, so passive queries get resolved without a click. The clicks that do happen on mobile are more deliberate and higher-intent — which is why Sanford & Son drew 203 of its 267 clicks from mobile, and why mobile-first optimization matters more every quarter.
Lifting the cluster of pages sitting at positions 12–50 — pages already earning impressions but ranking just below where clicks happen — onto page one, and pairing that with CTR optimization so existing rankings finally convert. Almost every client has at least one nameable page in this exact position.
The best first step is a conversation. You can request a quote or call us directly at (410) 439-1994. We'll talk through your current situation, your goals, and whether MOJO is the right fit.
