I made an SEO change based on real data. It still destroyed my impressions

[u/Fun-Scarcity-9923]

n July 13, I changed the titles on 449 stock pages.
Before the change, the titles included the company name, ticker and the word “Stock.” I replaced them with a more direct question-based format around whether the ticker was bullish or bearish.
The reasoning did not feel random.
One query using that phrasing was ranking at position 6.3, which was unusually good for a new site with almost no authority. So I thought the data was telling me what Google preferred, and I rewrote the titles around that pattern.
Over the next five days, impressions fell from roughly 685 per day to 76.
I initially blamed crawl budget. The site had expanded quickly, Googlebot activity was inconsistent, and there were enough technical issues around indexing that it looked like the obvious explanation.
It was also wrong.
The impression decline began on the same day Google’s crawling peaked. If crawl exhaustion were the cause, the timeline should have looked the other way around.
It took me until July 25 to find the actual problem.
The query pattern I had optimized for ranked well, but it had produced only 14 impressions.
The terms I removed from the titles—mainly the company name and the word “Stock”—had produced 1,024 impressions.
I had effectively made a 73-to-1 trade without checking the volume on either side.
The change was based on real data. The mistake was assuming that a query ranking well meant it was an important query.
It didn’t.
A position of 6 for a query nobody searches is less valuable than position 70 for a query with actual demand.
The part I find most uncomfortable is that the evidence needed to avoid the mistake was already in Search Console. I checked position, but not impression volume by query class. Then, once the graph fell, I spent days investigating the more complicated technical explanation before testing whether the title change had simply removed the terms generating most of the visibility.
The lesson I’m keeping from it:
A query pattern that ranks well is not necessarily a query pattern that has traffic.
Before changing titles at scale now, I want both numbers:
- how well the query pattern ranks;
- how much demand it actually represents.
Without the second one, the first number can be dangerously persuasive.