20 days in, 2 clicks from 843 impressions — but I'm not stopping
I launched Nexmetra 20 days ago — four free browser tools (online ruler, protractor, aspect ratio calculator/finder). Built solo, nights and weekends, on top of a job search that's been its own grind.
Here's where I actually am right now: 843 impressions in Google Search Console. 2 clicks. Average position 59.7. That's not a typo. I'm not even on page 1 — I'm not close to it.
For a while I convinced myself the problem was structural. I saw a competitor with a single-tool exact-match domain rank in 30 days and thought "maybe I made the wrong call bundling 4 tools under one domain." I almost tore the whole thing apart and split it into four separate domains out of pure frustration.
Turned out the real gap was simpler and less exciting: he had way more referring domains than me. Not a smarter architecture — just more backlinks, more directories, more visibility work done before I'd even started mine.
So instead of rebuilding, I'm doing the boring part I skipped: submitting to every legitimate directory I can find, posting where people are actually asking these questions, fixing slugs and metadata, one small thing at a time.
It's not exciting. Some days it feels like shouting into a void that has 2 clicks in it. But I built something that actually works, that's actually free, that actually helps people measure things without a signup wall — and I'd rather grind through the unglamorous distribution work than assume the product is the problem and start over.
If you're in the same spot — page 6 of Google, single-digit clicks, wondering if your whole approach is wrong — happy to compare notes. What actually moved the needle for you early on?
Position 59.7 at twenty days is not a verdict, and I say that as someone measuring the same thing on his own project right now.
Two things I got wrong early that might save you some time.
The first is that I counted listings instead of links. I had submitted to a lot of directories and had twenty four live pages carrying my product name, which felt like progress. Then I actually read the rel attribute on every outbound link those pages gave me. Five were followed. The rest were nofollow, pointed at an app store instead of my site, or mentioned me without linking at all. The pages are still worth having, they rank for the product name, but they were not the backlink profile I thought I had built.
The second is that I treated one indexation reading as settled. I tested twenty four of my pages by querying each one on its own exact title, three days apart, same method. The picture inverted between the two runs: pages that had been returning stopped, and pages that had been absent started. One platform went from four out of four to two out of four while another went the other way. If I had decided anything on the first reading I would have decided it wrong.
So the boring advice: query your own pages on their exact titles rather than trusting a site: search, and take the reading twice before you conclude anything from it. Impressions with no clicks at position 59 is what being crawled but not chosen looks like, and it is a different problem from not being indexed.
The near-decision to split everything into four domains is the part that stood out.
843 impressions and 2 clicks is evidence, but at 20 days it’s very easy to make that evidence carry more certainty than it actually has.