Zero backlinks, 312 impressions: what 90 days of Search Console looks like on a new site

A friend inquired about the initial state of a new website in Google Search Console, before it had any authority. This was a raw snapshot, as most accounts focus on the upward trend and omit the flat phase. The data covered 90 days with 33 indexable URLs, each containing 600 to 1800 words of text. Impressions totaled 312, with 1 click, averaging position 12.3.

There were 44 distinct search queries with at least one impression. Importantly, there were zero external links pointing to the site, indicating zero push towards the URLs, and the 312 impressions were a result of Google's passive testing of the site. Despite being on page one for ten queries, there were zero clicks. The queries were specific, such as "a food handlers prescription medicine must be stored servsafe" and "the first step in cooling a large roast".

The site faced two main issues: lack of authority and insufficient ranking for broad terms with thousands of searches per month. While question-level long tails were valuable, each one equated to about one visitor a month. Initially, gaining authority required time and links, which were out of the site's control. However, relevance could be improved by ensuring the question text appeared in the HTML.

This was achieved by incorporating the questions from a data file into the page content, which took around ninety minutes. The interactive quiz remained unchanged. As for someone in the 90-day period, the author suggests tracking impressions as they are the first indicator of coverage and represent queries that can be answered on existing pages.

Instead of creating new pages, focus on incorporating these high-intent queries into existing relevant pages. Lastly, verify that your best content can be read as plain HTML using tools like curl and grep. The author examined two pages, the practice test and answer breakdown, which were both updated to static HTML.