I published 126 pages in 10 weeks. Last week I got 3 clicks.

I launched Nethaven (net worth + budgeting app) on iOS in June. Since then I've been doing SEO "properly", or what the internet says is properly.
126 URLs live. 36 blog posts. 9 calculators. 11 competitor comparison pages. Sitemap regenerated on every deploy, IndexNow pinging Google and Bing, FAQ schema, canonical handling, internal links between every post. I even wrote a content standard into the codebase so future posts follow it.

Search Console, last 11 days:
- 106 impressions/day (was 14 in June)
- average position 25.6
- 3 clicks

Three.

The impressions part does work. Up 7x. New posts land on page 1 within days now, one is sitting at position 4.6 for "couples net worth tracker".

But position 4.6 with 18 impressions a week is zero clicks. And every keyword with real volume, I'm at position 35 to 62. "best net worth tracker": position 62. My own roundup page pulls 216 impressions and gets nothing, because it sits at 35.

So I finally got the thing people kept telling me and I kept ignoring. Content doesn't fix authority. I have zero backlinks. Nobody outside my own domain has ever written the word "Nethaven". Google has no reason to move me from 35 to 5 no matter how good the page is.

The dumb part is this was in my own planning doc since June. I just kept writing posts instead, because writing posts is fun and emailing strangers is not.

This week I'm doing the other half. Directory profiles first, the ones nobody can reject. Then trying to get into the "best net worth app" listicles that are currently beating me.

If you've been through this: what actually got you your first 5 referring domains? Not a link building guide. What worked for you specifically.