Two months, five sites, 69,000 impressions, 5 clicks: what actually happened
I launched five niche comparison sites in August 2026. Here are the real numbers, including the parts that went badly.
The raw data (Google Search Console, 3-month window):
| Site | Queries | Impressions | Clicks | Avg. position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| choosesaas.com (small-business SaaS) | 1,000 | 35,245 | 2 | — |
| hrcompared.com (HR software) | 1,000 | 14,807 | 1 | — |
| toolkitcreators.com (AI creator tools) | 961 | 8,809 | 0 | — |
| pmcompared.com (project management) | 798 | 8,313 | 1 | — |
| cyberpicks.org (security tools) | 362 | 1,747 | 1 | 65.6 |
| Total | 4,122 | 68,921 | 5 | — |
That is a click-through rate of roughly 0.04%. Five clicks from 69,000 impressions.
What the data actually told me
1. Impressions without clicks means "page 7". Our average position sits between 65 and 77. Google is showing our pages to people, then burying them on results pages nobody opens. The content isn't invisible — it's just ranked too low to matter.
2. Half the keyword list was noise. On two sites, 57–60% of "keywords" had 2 impressions or fewer over three months. Those aren't keywords, they're log noise. I was about to plan content around them.
3. The biggest single opportunity was hiding in plain sight. On the SaaS site, one cluster of six phrasing variants ("marketing automation software", "...tools", "...platform", etc.) accounted for 2,925 impressions — ranked 83 to 91. The page existed. It just wasn't connected to anything, so Google treated it as an orphan.
What I changed
Internal links, surgically. Not "add more links everywhere" — I pulled the GSC query list, filtered for terms ranking 21–60 (close enough to move), then pointed 3–4 topically related pages at each one. 99 links across five sites.
Fixed what Google never told me about. The mail warnings said "sitemap pages not indexed." When I actually checked, every one of those URLs returned 301/308 correctly — the warnings were stale records from August. The real problem was the opposite: 11 articles were missing from the sitemap entirely. One of them was the landing page for a 30-impression keyword cluster. Nobody had noticed it was invisible.
Went around the approval gate. PartnerStack rejected us. Impact rejected us. So instead of waiting, I switched to affiliate programs that don't have an approval process at all — register an account, get your link immediately. Two of them are live now: one paying 60% lifetime recurring, one paying 35% lifetime recurring.
The thing I was wrong about
For weeks I kept saying "the operation must be done by you" about anything requiring a login — I assumed GSC's "request indexing" had to be done by hand since there's no API. There's no API, correct. But that doesn't mean it can't be automated. It took one afternoon to script it through the browser: now 10 priority pages get pushed into the crawl queue daily without me touching anything.
Where it stands
- 3 affiliate programs live and earning-capable, 4 more pending review
- 99 internal links deployed, all verified
- A crawl queue of 72 undiscovered pages being pushed daily
- Still: 0 external backlinks. That's the next wall.
Two months in, 69,000 impressions and five clicks. Not a win yet. But the pipeline is built, and now I know exactly which lever to pull next.
Happy to answer questions about any of this in the comments — especially if you've hit the same "impressions but no clicks" wall.
If you need a site like these built (or want your existing one diagnosed), I take on that kind of work: /