I regularly see founders posting about how they got thousands of visits from Google in their first month or two. "10K organic visits in 60 days." "How I ranked page 1 in 30 days."
I want to show what it actually looks like when you start a new site with no existing audience, no ad spend, and no other sites linking to you.
I launched a SaaS tool (ConversionProbe, a landing page audit tool) about 12 weeks ago. Here's the real data from Google Search Console (where Google shows you how your site is doing in search) for Feb 12 to Apr 28, 2026.
The numbers
- 806 total impressions (the number of times Google showed one of my pages in search results)
- 1 click. One. Most likely me checking if my site actually showed up.
- Average position: improved from around 57 in late March to around 47 by late April
- 90% of impressions came from desktop. Mobile was about 10%.
Top countries by impressions: United States (650), UK (22), Brazil (20), Canada (11). Zero clicks from any of them.
What people searched to find me
The top queries that got my pages into Google results:
- "cro consultant" (CRO means conversion rate optimization, which is helping websites convert more visitors into customers): 289 impressions, 0 clicks
- "landing page conversion rate": 76 impressions, 0 clicks
- "landing page conversion rate benchmark": 27 impressions, 0 clicks
- "landing page not converting": 16 impressions, 0 clicks
Google showed my pages. But I was showing up on page 5 or 6 or 7 of the results. Nobody scrolls past page 2.
What the timeline actually looks like
Here's the daily impression chart.
Feb 12-21: zero to two impressions per day. Google barely knew the site existed.
Feb 22-28: jumped to 1-13 per day. Pages started showing up in Google.
Mar 18-30: the spike. 18-40 impressions per day, peaking at 40. Content was getting picked up.
Apr 1-17: dropped back to 3-18 per day. A correction after the March spike.
Apr 18-28: settled into 0-16 per day.
That March spike would look great in a screenshot if I cropped the chart just right. "40 impressions per day in 5 weeks!" But zoom out and the line is almost flat. I think a lot of those viral posts do exactly this: crop to the spike, skip the context around it.
Why this is slow (and why it's normal)
Two pages account for most of my impressions:
- A comparison page about hiring a CRO (conversion rate optimization) consultant: 301 impressions, position 57. That's page 6 of Google.
- A guide about landing page conversion rate benchmarks: 209 impressions, position 68. Page 7.
301 impressions at position 57 means Google showed that page to people hundreds of times. But position 57 is page 6. Nobody looks at page 6.
Why? None of it is about content quality.
The site is 12 weeks old. Google doesn't trust new domains the way it trusts sites that have been around for years. I didn't know this when I started. I published 11 pages, checked my numbers every morning, and couldn't figure out why nothing was happening. Turns out "nothing" is the expected output for a new domain.
Almost no other sites link to mine. Links from other websites are how Google decides whether a site is worth showing to people. A new site has none. Getting them takes months of writing for other sites, or building something people want to reference. I have two directory listings. That's it.
The terms are competitive. "Landing page conversion rate" has sites on page 1 that have existed for years with thousands of links pointing to them. A 12-week-old site with two directory listings doesn't get to compete with that yet.
Those "10K visits in 30 days" posts almost never mention these things. When someone gets fast results from Google, it's usually because one or more was already true before they started: they had a domain that had been around for a while, they had an audience that linked to them naturally, or they picked terms with almost no competition. That context is the part that gets left out.
The part that doesn't match the story
Eight of my pages are already in Google's top 10 results for the terms I was aiming for.
| Page | Impressions | Average position |
|---|---|---|
| ConversionProbe vs Google Lighthouse | 9 | 3 |
| ConversionProbe vs Heatmap Tools | 7 | 4.7 |
| How to use persuasion on landing pages | 50 | 5.8 |
| How to add urgency to your landing page | 11 | 6.2 |
| SaaS landing page audit study 2026 | 13 | 7.1 |
| Landing page psychology quiz | 6 | 7.2 |
| What should be above the fold | 6 | 8 |
| Landing page psychology guide | 90 | 8.4 |
The catch: I picked these terms on purpose. Low competition, almost nobody searching for them. I wanted to know if my content could rank at all before spending months on terms people actually search for. It can. Position 3 with 9 impressions doesn't bring anyone to my site. But now I know the content can rank.
Can I climb from page 6 to page 1 for terms people search every day? That's the next thing to test.
What to look for in your own data
Looking at my own data now, two things jumped out.
The CRO consultant page has 301 impressions at position 57. The demand for that term is there. But my site is too new and has too few links for Google to put it on page 1. That page has to wait until the site has more authority behind it.
The comparison pages and guides were the opposite. Good positions, almost no impressions. Those told me my content can rank. They also told me I was writing for terms almost nobody was searching for. Next round I'm picking long-tail terms that more people actually search for.
Try it yourself
If you're sitting on page 5 with decent impressions and zero clicks, the problem might not be your ranking. It might be your page. ConversionProbe reads your landing page the way a first-time visitor would and tells you what to fix and in what order. Paste your URL, get a report in 60 seconds.