Day 14: 33K Google impressions, 0 backlinks — here's my SEO playbook
Two weeks ago I posted about building a comparison site with 10K+ pages. Here's what happened since launch.
The numbers
- 33,467 impressions
- 70 clicks
- 50+ countries
- Pages on Google page 1 already
- $0 spent on ads
Growth was flat for the first week, then exploded on day 10 when Google finished crawling the sitemap. Went from 700 to 12K impressions in a single day.
What worked
IndexNow on day 1. I submitted all 10K URLs to Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam the moment I deployed. Google started crawling within hours. Most people wait for Google to find them — don't.
Comparison pages rank fastest. "Brand A vs Brand B" queries are long-tail and low competition. These hit page 1 within days while broader keywords are still on page 3-4.
Structured data everywhere. Every page has schema.org markup (Review, FAQ, Dataset, Breadcrumb). Google rewards this with better indexing and eventually rich snippets.
Real data, not templates. Every page uses actual numbers from the database — pricing, features, compliance status. Google can tell the difference between a page that says "competitive pricing" and one that says "$0.8 per unit".
What didn't work
- Blocked /_next/ in robots.txt — Google needs JS to render pages. Cost me a few days of indexing.
- Duplicate structured data — a React component and the page both rendered FAQ schema. Thousands of GSC warnings.
- Didn't check GSC until day 7. Should have monitored from day 1.
What's next
CTR is 0.2% — the main bottleneck now. Already optimized all meta description templates to include specific data and ratings instead of generic text.
Next: backlinks through original datasets and data visualizations, plus guest posts on dev blogs.
The site: https://brokerrank.net/data/average-spreads — a comparison platform with 300+ products and 10K pages, built with Next.js and PostgreSQL.
Happy to answer questions about the SEO approach or tech stack.
