3 weeks of SEO content on a new domain: 2 of 9 guides got traffic, 7 got none

The indexing answers above are right, but here's a different read: look at what your two winners have in common besides being broad. "How do I calculate X" is a query with one correct answer. A page that can fully satisfy a question tends to get picked up faster on a new domain than a page that surveys a topic, because there's nothing left to compare it against.

Your five niche/industry guides are probably up against the vendors in that industry, who have owned those terms for years. That isn't a three-weeks-is-too-early problem, that's a you-can't-outrank-them-with-a-guide problem, and six more weeks won't change it.

What I'd try instead of waiting: take one niche guide and turn it into a table with actual numbers in it, every cell carrying its source and the date you checked it. Not a guide about the niche - the data for the niche. Those get cited, including by AI assistants, which on a young domain is a faster door than ranking.

Cheap thing while you're in there: add a /llms.txt. Ten minutes, and it costs you nothing if it turns out not to matter.

Three weeks is long enough to spot indexing differences, but too short to call topical authority. I would compare the two winners and seven quiet pages on search intent, internal links, and whether each page answers a distinct follow-up question, then recheck search impressions and AI answer mentions after a longer holdout.

Good write-up. What would you do differently if you started again?

One thing I'd check before drawing conclusions: whether the 7 zero-traffic guides are even indexed yet. On a brand-new domain, Google often takes weeks to crawl and rank fresh pages, so the gap may be crawl priority rather than topic choice. Search Console impressions per URL will tell you the truth fast — if the niche guides show zero impressions, that's an indexing/crawl-budget problem, not proof broad beats niche. I'd give them a few more weeks and build internal links from the two winners into the niche pages before pivoting your whole content strategy.

I’d be careful about concluding that broad content is winning just because those two guides received traffic.

The more interesting question for me would be whether the traffic matches the product’s target audience. A generic “how do I calculate this” query can have much larger search demand, but a niche query can bring fewer visitors who are much closer to the actual problem you want to solve.

I’d probably keep both types of content running for a while and compare impressions, clicks, engagement and whether visitors take a meaningful product action.

That could reveal whether the niche guides are actually underperforming, or simply producing a smaller but more relevant audience.

Three weeks is early enough that I’d avoid treating zero as a content verdict. I’d segment by impressions/indexing, intent, and internal links: broad calculator guides may have cleaner demand, while niche pages need a stronger cluster and distribution. If you revisit in 6–8 weeks, will you keep the same titles/URLs so the cohort stays comparable, or iterate on them as data arrives?

How did you decide this was worth building in the first place?

This resonates a lot — how long did it take before you saw any real signal on it?

Good point. Did you test that with users before committing to it?

Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?

What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?

Thanks for sharing the numbers, that makes it much easier to follow.

Really solid approach — curious how you're thinking about this, what's been the hardest part to figure out so far?

What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?

What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?

Raw hits cannot separate the two cases that decide your next move. A guide nobody wants and a guide Google has not indexed yet look identical in a log. Search Console splits them: zero impressions means it was never shown to anyone, impressions with no clicks means it ranks and the title is losing the click. The first needs time or links, the second needs a new title and description.
Position on its own is not a promise either. A plugin I published sits 8th for its main keyword and still gets about 2 downloads a day, so the ranking was fine and the demand behind that phrase was just small. Worth checking the impression count on your two winners before you write more like them.
For the 7 that got nothing, are they at zero impressions, or are they showing and not getting clicked?

Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?

Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?

Before favoring broad content, what evidence would separate topic breadth from search demand, keyword competition, and indexing time as the reason niche guides have zero traffic?

Your fuller breakdown changes the comparison: the 106 and 103 are bot-inclusive page hits, while the browser beacon is site-wide. I wouldn't yet call those two guides the organic-search winners, or conclude that broad beats niche.

I'd put each guide in a small table: publication date, Google indexing status, Search Console impressions/clicks for the same dates, and human visits that reach the calculator. That separates not indexed, indexed but rarely shown, and shown but not clicked. Even a JS beacon is a useful filter rather than proof that every visit is human.

I operate Fooglemap, a local-meal map. Our latest Search Console seven-day window (Sept 15–21) has 9 impressions and zero clicks despite a healthy sitemap; our guide page is still discovered but not indexed. That's a visibility problem, not evidence that the topic cannot work, and the sample is too small to generalize from.

For your next test, I'd keep the two calculation guides intact, link each to one genuinely relevant industry example, and compare page-level organic data over an equal follow-up window before publishing five more vertical pages. Do you already have per-guide Search Console impressions?

Disclosure: Fooglemap operator; written with AI assistance.

Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?

For anyone who wants the fuller breakdown, here's what the traffic actually looked like:

I run TechSplit, a small tool that calculates commission and tip payouts for field-service techs (mobile grooming, home inspection, lawn care, pool service, mobile detailing). On Sept 1 I started publishing guides. Here's what three weeks produced.

Most of the traffic was bots. 6,060 raw requests site-wide. A beacon that only fires from a real browser running JS shows about 435 human page views total, roughly 20 a day, or 7% of raw. Identified bots included Ahrefs' site auditor (333), Anthropic's crawler (188), Googlebot (165), assorted curl and Go-http-client scripts, and a spoofed 2019 iPhone user-agent that accounted for 527 requests by itself.

Of 9 guides, 2 got traffic. (Quick note: the numbers below are raw per-page hits from the same bot-inclusive log as the 6,060 total, not the human-view beacon above, which only reports site-wide. That's why they won't add up to the 435 if you do the math.)

How to calculate technician commission: 106 hits
How to split pooled tips fairly: 103 hits
The guides hub itself: 134 hits

The other 7 got effectively zero. That includes a third fundamentals guide (how to read a commission payout summary), my one comparison guide, and all five industry-specific guides. They didn't even show up in top paths.

Both winners answer a generic "how do I do this math" question. The niche vertical guides drew nothing, and so did the fundamentals guide that wasn't about the math itself.

One more signal: the $49 sheet template page got 230 hits. The free interactive calculator got 141. The paid thing drew more attention than the free thing.

Caveats: this is a 3-week-old domain with tiny numbers. It's a snapshot, not a conclusion. The niche pages may simply not have had time to get indexed or ranked.

My question: has anyone else seen broad "how do I calculate X" content beat niche or vertical content this early? If you kept publishing the niche pages, did they eventually compound, or did broad keep winning?