1.5K Google impressions, 0 clicks, $0 revenue — what I learned before touching SEO again
I’m documenting a small affiliate-funded email-marketing project called ScribaEcho because the numbers are a useful reminder that “indexed” is not the same thing as “distributed.”
Here’s the uncomfortable snapshot:
- ~1.5K Google Search Console impressions in the last 28 days
- 0 Search Console clicks
- 0 confirmed external-entry signals in first-party analytics
- 0 provider signups / $0 commissions
- a Pinterest test that has produced 3 impressions and 0 outbound clicks
- an earlier contextual Indie Hackers link placement that produced 0 measured landings in its first-day window
The interesting part is that Google is already testing some commercial-intent queries. One example is convertkit vs getresponse: 28 impressions, but the page is still around position 43 and has generated no click.
That changed how I’m thinking about the project.
What I stopped doing
I stopped treating every zero as a reason to redesign a page, rewrite a title, publish another social post, or add more content.
That behavior creates activity, but it also destroys causality. If five things change while traffic is near zero, you learn almost nothing from the next zero.
The decision rule I’m using now
A new piece of work has to do one of two things:
- respond to buyer intent that already exists in Search Console, or
- create a genuinely new, measurable external-entry route.
Everything else gets deprioritized.
I also separated provider-side click totals from actual acquisition evidence. Affiliate dashboards can backfill or count repeat/QA activity, so I no longer call a dashboard click “traction” unless it matches first-party entry evidence or a real signup.
That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to convince yourself that a moving number is progress when revenue is still zero.
What I’m testing next
For the comparison query above, the live page is here:
Disclosure: ScribaEcho is affiliate-funded and some provider links on the site can earn a commission. The link above goes to the comparison page, not directly to an affiliate redirect.
My current question is less “how do I rank this page?” and more:
If you had ~1.5K impressions, zero organic clicks, and zero revenue, would you spend the next week on distribution, keep working the existing buyer-intent pages, or kill/pivot the project before doing either?
I’m especially interested in where other bootstrappers draw the line between “too early to judge” and “the market is giving you an answer.”
Position 43 with zero clicks isn't telling you anything about the page. Clicks start on page one, so until you're in the top ten the page isn't the variable.
I've lived off SEO for 22 years, and the one rule that has never failed me is this. Take the keyword you want and open all ten results on the first page. Read them properly. Then write the piece that covers everything those ten cover between them, and add whatever you know from your own experience that none of them could have written. Google rewards that. Keep doing it and the traffic changes within months, not years.
Your convertkit vs getresponse page is the obvious place to start, since Google is already showing it for a query with buying intent. Compared against the ten pages currently above it, what does yours not answer?
The one thing I'd add: my marketplace took two years to reach the first page for its main terms, and every week inside those two years looked exactly like your snapshot.
One correction to your own rule, from the merchant side of affiliate tracking, which is what I build: a "click" in an affiliate dashboard is counted at the redirect, before your page has loaded anything. Link checkers, email scanners, prefetchers and bored bots all count. So provider clicks and first-party landings aren't two measurements of one thing that should roughly agree. They're two different events, and a gap between them is normal rather than suspicious. The number worth writing down each week is the ratio: a ratio that suddenly moves tells you something changed, while either number alone tells you nothing.
On the 28 impressions at position 43: that's Google testing whether the page belongs on the query, which is a signal about the page, not about demand. Demand shows up when the position gets under 20 and the clicks still don't come.
That distinction is useful — I was treating the provider/first-party gap too suspiciously. I’m going to change the weekly tracking to record redirect clicks, first-party landings, and the ratio between them instead of expecting the two counts to roughly match.
The <20 point is also a much better decision boundary than treating impressions alone as demand evidence. For this comparison page I’ll watch whether the query actually moves into the 20s/teens before using zero clicks as a reason to rewrite the SERP copy.
Thanks — this is exactly the kind of correction I was hoping the post would surface.
That’s actually a very low number of impressions. It’s typical either for penalized sites or brand-new ones (under 3 months old).
The 28 impressions for a commercial query are interesting, but at position 43 the zero clicks don’t say much about demand yet. What downstream signal would convince you the existing buyer intent is worth pursuing before deciding to kill or pivot?
For me the threshold would be evidence that the intent can produce a real downstream action, not just more impressions. The cleanest version is: the query moves into the top 20 and starts producing organic clicks, then at least some of those visitors reach a provider comparison/CTA; a confirmed provider signup would obviously be the strongest signal.
If rankings improve but clicks stay at zero, I’d question the SERP proposition. If clicks arrive but nobody continues toward a provider, I’d question the page/offer fit. Right now we’re still before both of those stages, so I’m treating this more as an exposure problem than a conversion verdict.
That’s a sensible funnel to watch. If you’re open to it, what’s the best email to reach you on?
Nearly the same numbers here, and the query breakdown is what made it click for me, so it might be worth pulling yours.
Mine: 1.7k impressions, 3 clicks, average position 68 over 28 days. The query export showed 74% between positions 60–80, with nothing at all between 10–40. Someone else here pulled the same export today on a completely different site and saw the same shape.
I think that gap is the useful part. If people were seeing the result and choosing competitors, you'd expect some queries around positions 8–15. Instead there's a cliff: the page isn't really being seen, so rewriting it can't change much.
Your position-43 query is worth watching. If it reaches the 20s and still gets no clicks, then title/description becomes a real suspect. Until then, it's more a coverage metric than an exposure metric.