I built 140 SEO pages in 3 weeks. Google sent me one click.
Three weeks ago I started rebuilding a dead domain into a free browser tools site. Calculators, converters, timers, a wheel spinner, text utilities. 140 pages now, all statically generated, no accounts, nothing you type leaves your browser.
I did the SEO by the book. Clean sitemap, structured data on every page, unique titles and descriptions, internal linking, IndexNow submissions, fast mobile pages.
Here is what a month of that returned:
182 impressions a day
Average position 58
1 click. Total.
The click came from a phone in Chile searching "1 to 100 spinner".
Four things I did not expect.
1. Google answers the highest volume tool queries itself. Search "5 minute timer" and Google renders a working countdown at the top. Same for unit conversion, percentages, and time math. I had built pages targeting all of those. There is no click left for anyone.
2. Near duplicate pages returned almost nothing. I built 56 pages for "$X an hour is how much a year", one per wage. Across a full day, 55 of them got zero impressions. That is 0.19 impressions per page. My 7 blog posts returned 13.4 each, seventy times better for a tenth of the pages.
3. The gap between clusters is competition, not quality. My wheel pages average position 38, my payroll pages 63. Same site, same work. The wheel results are held by small sites. The payroll ones are held by ADP, Clockify and QuickBooks.
4. Zero backlinks explains everything else. Google matches my pages to the right queries. It just puts them on page six. I got my first real backlink this week, from a directory listing. What I would do differently: test a page type with five pages, not fifty six, and check whether Google already answers the query before building anything for it.
The site is at ziannah.com if you want to poke at it. Genuinely more useful to me if you tell me what is broken. Anyone else got real numbers from a content or programmatic SEO push? I would like to know whether one click in a month is normal for a new domain or whether I have done something specifically wrong.
Tool aggregators can work well if one tool becomes the ‘anchor’. Which feature is driving most repeat usage right now?
too early for me to have real repeat usage data honestly. but the wheel spinner is the one that keeps showing up, and its the only tool where anyone has a reason to come back or pass it on the share link encodes the options into the url, so you can send someone a wheel you already set up. nothing else on the site works like that. a timesheet calculator is a one and done thing so if an anchor forms it'll probably be that, more for structural reasons than anything i've properly measured yet
That’s a really sharp observation — tools that encode state into a shareable output tend to create their own distribution.
The wheel isn’t just a tool, it’s a unit of content.
Feels like there might be something there beyond just utility — have you explored leaning into that behavior more deliberately?
One thing I appreciate about posts like this is seeing the assumptions that didn't survive contact with reality.
It's easy to mistake effort for evidence until real users—or in this case, real search results—force you to separate the two.
yeah the big one was thinking volume meant there was a click available. built pages for 5 minute timer and minutes to decimal before realising google just shows its own timer and calculator right in the results. cant win that one
That's a great example. Thanks for sharing it.
I'd enjoy continuing the conversation outside the thread if you're open to it. What's the best email to reach you on?
hello@ziannah(.)com works. happy to keep it in the thread too if its something others might find useful
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.