Your search and analytics review

This is a full review of how your website is performing: what Google does with it, who actually visits it, what is working, what is holding it back, and what we think should happen next. It covers the whole period we have data for, which is roughly the last twelve months.

You asked a direct question earlier this month: is it only people searching my name? Part three answers it precisely. The short version is that today it is mostly your name, but not entirely, and the part that is not your name is where the opportunity sits.

How the site is doing in Google

This is the measure most people mean when they ask about visibility: how often your site appears in a Google result. It has gone from around fifteen a month a year ago to roughly three hundred. August is drawn hollow because the month is not finished; that figure covers the first twenty-two days.

Times your site appeared in Google search results, by month. September 2025 to August 2026.

Clicks have followed, more slowly

Appearances only matter if they turn into visits. They have, though at a smaller scale, which is normal for a personal site of this age. Clicks went from one or two a month at the end of last year to a steady ten to fifteen now.

Clicks from Google search results, by month. August is a partial month.

The two halves, side by side

The clearest way to read this is to compare the first six months of data against the most recent six. It smooths out the month to month noise.

One number that looks worse and is not

Your average position in Google has moved from about 7 to about 16 over the same period. Read on its own, that looks like a decline. It is close to the opposite. A year ago you appeared almost only for your own name, which sits near the top of page one, so the average was flattering. Since then Google has started showing you for actual subject searches where you currently rank far down the results. More of those low-ranking appearances drags the average down while the underlying picture improves. The honest read is that average position is not a useful number for you yet, and we would rather explain that than quote it as progress.

Who is actually visiting

Search Console tells you what Google does. Your analytics tell you what people do. These measure different things, and the gap between them is the most useful thing in this section.

Visitors to trevormccandless.com by month. August is a partial month.

How people arrive, and why it matters

How visitors reached the site, October 2025 to August 2026.

Eighty-three per cent of your visitors type your address or follow a link you gave them. Only fourteen per cent arrive from a search engine. That is exactly what you would expect from someone who posts daily on LinkedIn and hands out his URL, and it is not a failure. It is a real audience arriving in a way that has nothing to do with Google.

It does mean two things worth being clear about. First, search is currently a small part of your actual audience, so a change in rankings moves a small number. Second, and more usefully, the people who already arrive directly are the ones this site has to convince, and nothing on it currently asks them to do anything. That is part eight.

Which pages people actually read

The shape here is a site people arrive at, look at the front of, and read a little of. The home page takes two thirds of all visits. The blog index gets a good share, which suggests people do browse the writing rather than landing on one article and leaving. Keynote has the highest views per visitor on the list, a small signal that speaking is something people come specifically to check.

Where they are

Just over half your visitors are in the United States. The Philippines and Honduras figures are large relative to the total and do not look like a US tax and advisory audience, so our read is that these are most likely colleagues or team members rather than prospective clients. Worth confirming with you, because it changes how we should read the totals.

Three quarters of visits are on desktop, which is unusual and useful. It fits a professional audience reading at work rather than one browsing on a phone.

What Google shows you for

This is the direct answer to your question. We took every search Google recorded for your site over the last six months and sorted them into groups.

So: yes, today every click we can trace came from someone typing your name. Twenty-six of them, at an average position of 4.5, with roughly one in five of those people clicking through. For a personal site, owning your own name is the first job, and you are doing it well.

The third row is the one to look at. Google showed your site 98 times to people searching for subjects, with your name nowhere in the search. It has worked out what you write about and it is already putting you in front of strangers. They are just not seeing you high enough on the page to click.

The searches themselves

Google withholds very low volume searches, so this table accounts for 453 of the 1,236 total appearances. The proportions are sound; the absolute numbers are a floor.

Ten per cent of your appearances go to people looking for a different McCandless: Mike, Mark, Tim, Michael, Stephanie and about sixteen others. There is nothing to do about that, but it is worth knowing your appearance count is slightly inflated by it.

The Fusion CPA problem

The single largest search in your entire profile is people looking for your firm's website. It appears 159 times, your site sits at position 7.8, and not one person clicks.

Some of that is correct behaviour. They wanted fusiontaxes.com, they saw fusiontaxes.com, they clicked it. But 159 people saw your personal site offered as an answer to "fusion cpa website" and none of them found a reason to look.

There is a technical error underneath it

Every page carries hidden structured data telling Google what the site is and who it belongs to. Yours is mostly very good. It correctly identifies you as a person, names your role as CEO at Fusion CPA, lists your degree from the University of Florida and your Master's in Taxation from Georgia State, and links your LinkedIn, your X account and the firm's website. In a field where Google weighs credentials heavily, that foundation is doing real work for you.

One field in it is wrong, and it is an important one. The block describing the financial services business called Fusion CPA gives its website as:

In plain terms, we are telling Google in machine-readable form that your personal blog is the firm. That is very likely contributing to the confusion above, where your personal site is offered to people searching for the firm and satisfies nobody. It is one field, we can fix it this week, and it costs nothing.

Where you are already close

Google has filed you under one subject in particular, off the back of a single article. Five different ways of phrasing the same search, 56 appearances between them over six months, and every one at position 88 to 98.

Position 88 is page nine. Nobody goes to page nine, which is why these produce no clicks. But being on page nine for a subject is a fundamentally different situation from not being there at all. It means Google has read Planning Ahead of 2026 Liquidity Events, understood the topic, and associated you with it. The work is moving an existing page up, not starting from nothing.

One more is worth naming. You currently sit at position 7.2 for "operating entities", which is page one, off Operating Entities and Trusts Structuring. The volume is small, but it is proof this site can rank on subject matter when the page is right.

What we found in the research

Alongside your own data we looked at the live search results your prospective clients see, what people in your market actually ask, and how much demand exists for the subjects you write about. Some of this is encouraging and some is not, so here is all of it.

Nobody on that page is an accountant

We pulled the live first page for the pre-liquidity searches above. Every result:

William Blair, Crewe Advisors, Morgan Stanley, Caprock, Evercore, JFS Wealth Advisors, Aspiriant, Beacon Pointe, a private wealth law firm, Sky View Financial Group, and Oppenheimer.

Eleven results. Wealth managers, private banks, family offices and a law firm. Not one CPA.

"What should my wealth manager be doing before I sell" and "what should my CPA be doing three years before I sell" are genuinely different questions, and only one of them is being answered on that page. You are the person who answers the other one, and you have lived the family business side of it yourself.

The biggest search in your subject is not winnable

"Family business succession planning" is searched about 2,900 times a month, by far the largest relevant term we found. We checked who holds page one for it:

Cherry Bekaert (a top-25 US accounting firm), US Bank, Egon Zehnder, Centier Bank, the Family Business Consulting Group, familybusiness.org, Deloitte and Harvard Business Review.

A personal site does not enter that page, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or spend your time trying. We also checked whether Google's AI answer for that search cites different sources, in case that offered a way around the ranking. It does not: the AI answer quotes substantially the same institutions.

What demand actually exists

We tested seventeen candidate searches across your subject areas. Seven returned a reportable monthly volume; ten returned no estimate at all.

These are small numbers and we are not going to dress them up. The searches that clearly exist in your space are specific, low volume and high intent. That is not a traffic strategy. It can still be a client strategy, because a handful of the right people at the right moment is worth more to Fusion CPA than a thousand casual readers, but the two should not be confused.

One caveat that cuts in your favour: "no estimate returned" is not the same as "nobody searches this". Your own Search Console shows Google served your page for the pre-liquidity phrasings 56 times, and those phrasings return no estimate from the forecasting tools. The tools have a reporting floor. Real searches happen below it.

What people in your market are actually asking

We went looking for where these conversations happen when people do not use Google. The strongest single thread we found, on Reddit's small business community:

Two more, both from the tax community:

And running underneath a lot of it, one consistent complaint about how accountants behave:

The reactive accountant is the live grievance in your market, and you have already written the article for it: Why Your Accountant Should Be Your Confidant. It is one of the seven pages Google has crawled and declined to index, which is covered in the next part.

A note on this research: our automated collection was rate-limited partway through, so this is a genuine sample rather than a complete survey. The threads quoted are real and were checked. We would not want you to read it as the whole conversation.

Google's AI is already quoting you

Over a recent three month window your site appeared 31 times inside Google's AI-generated answers, across five pages. The page cited second most often, after your home page, is The Family Blueprint.

That is worth knowing for one reason: it confirms the family business and succession material is the part of your writing Google finds most quotable. We are tracking it because it is new and it is growing. We would caution against treating it as a channel. Being quoted is not the same as being visited, and an AI answer can satisfy a reader without ever sending them to you.

The technical health of the site

The site is in good technical order. There is no crisis here, and the items below are specific and fixable rather than structural.

Seven pages Google will not keep

Google has indexed 41 of your 48 pages. Seven are not:

"Crawled, not indexed" means Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to store it. On a site with few external links that usually means the page is short, or that nothing else on the site links to it, rather than anything being broken.

Two of these matter more than the others. Family Business Changed My Mind sits on your one subject with real search demand. Why Your Accountant Should Be Your Confidant answers the live grievance in your market. Both being invisible is the most fixable thing in this report. We submitted all six to Google for reconsideration on 19 August and they have not been picked up yet, so the next step is internal linking, which is the lever that actually tends to move this.

Almost nothing on the internet links to your site

Your site has eleven links from six different places, and five of those come from directories we run. Links remain the main way Google decides whether to trust a site enough to rank it, and in tax and financial advice it applies that test more strictly than almost anywhere, because bad advice there causes real harm.

This is the ceiling on everything else in this report. Fixing the structured data, clearing the unindexed pages and rewriting the pre-liquidity article all help, and all of them are capped by this number.

The easiest one is the one you control. fusiontaxes.com does not currently link to trevormccandless.com. A link from your bio or team page on the firm's site is easy, entirely relevant, and it also tells Google plainly how the two properties relate. We would not promise you a ranking jump from a single link, but it is the obvious first one and it is free.

Everything else

Twenty-two articles have never been shown once

You have thirty-seven articles. Twenty-two of them have never appeared in a single search result. That is a direct consequence of the publishing model, where every LinkedIn post is repurposed onto the site, and it is not in itself a problem. Those posts do no harm individually.

Collectively they do spread Google's attention across thirty-seven pages instead of concentrating it on the five or six that could genuinely rank. There is a choice here and it is yours:

• Keep everything exactly as it is. The archive stays complete and Google works it out over time. Entirely defensible.
• Keep publishing everything, but tell Google not to index the posts with no search job. Nothing disappears from your site, your archive is untouched, and the pages that matter stop competing with the ones that do not.

We wanted to show you the number rather than decide for you.

What we cannot tell you yet

We can show you exactly what Google is doing with your site and we can show you it is improving. What we cannot yet tell you is what any of it is worth to Fusion CPA.

The site has never had a defined action for a visitor to take, and nothing on it is tracked. So when you ask the fair question, how many clients has this produced, the honest answer today is that nobody can say. We would rather tell you that now than show you rising charts that never connect to anything.

That is the first thing we would like to fix, and it needs one decision from you: what should a good visitor actually do? Three options fit what you have, and any of them can be measured:

• A short consultation booking, aimed specifically at owners two to three years out from a sale. The highest intent, and closest to how you actually win clients.
• A pre-liquidity checklist people can request by email. Lower commitment, and it builds a list of exactly the right people over time.
• A direct route into Fusion CPA for anyone who arrives already knowing what they want, so the personal site feeds the firm rather than standing apart from it.

Whichever you choose, we put tracking behind it. By the next review this conversation is about enquiries rather than appearances.

The plan

Ordered by what we think returns most for the effort. The first seven need nothing from you.

Already done since we last spoke

• Six unindexed pages submitted to Google for reconsideration.
• Listed on aboutideasnow.com, a directory of personal sites, with your About and Now pages both indexed there.
• Your About page now states your name in your own words, links both Fusion CPA and Family Business Consultant, and carries a last-updated line.
• A full broken-link sweep across all 50 pages, which came back clean apart from the two links noted above.

What good looks like from here

This is a personal site in a field where the top results are Deloitte, Harvard Business Review and US Bank. We are not going to outrank those, and chasing the biggest terms in your subject would be spending your time on an argument we cannot win.

What is genuinely winnable is narrower and more valuable: being the accountant who shows up for the specific questions a business owner asks in the two or three years before they sell, being quoted when Google's AI answers those questions, and being unambiguously credible when someone looks you up in the middle of deciding whether to hire your firm.

Over the next ninety days you should expect the number of different subjects you appear for to go up, the pre-liquidity questions to move from page nine towards page one, and the first clicks that have nothing to do with your name to arrive. If none of that happens, we will tell you plainly and change the approach rather than quietly carry on.

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