Started a small site in March, publishing one article a week, 12 posts up. Everything is indexed within a couple of days but impressions stay in single digits for weeks and clicks are basically zero. I keep reading that new sites take time but nobody says how much time or what the first real sign of life looks like. What did the first six months look like for you?
Indexed in two days and single-digit impressions for weeks is completely normal for a new site. On the three small sites I've started, the shape was the same: months 1-3 nearly flat, a scattering of impressions on long queries around month 4, then a page or two finding a stable position around month 6-8 and pulling the rest along. The first real sign of life is not clicks, it's the same query showing up in Search Console day after day instead of once.
That's a useful signal to watch, I've been staring at the clicks number and getting demoralised.
Check what queries you're getting impressions for. If they're wildly off topic, the pages aren't clear about what they answer. If they're on topic but you're at position 40, that's normal early-site behaviour and it will creep up. Very different problems that look the same on a graph.
Twelve posts is also just not very many. A site with 12 pages has almost no internal linking to work with and nothing that looks like coverage of a topic. I wouldn't expect much before 30 or so posts in one tight subject area.
Would add that 30 posts on one narrow subject beats 30 spread across four subjects by a long way. My first site was a bit of everything and it went nowhere for a year.
Mine's fairly narrow thankfully, all one hobby. Will keep going to 30 before I panic.
@pivot_pete · last yr.
One practical thing while you wait: go find where your audience already hangs out and be useful there. Not to drop links, just because the first hundred readers of a new site never come from search anyway.
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