SEO case study: a new site from 24 to 326 Google clicks

Our own site, mpowebstudio.com, grew from 24 to 326 Google clicks on a brand-new domain: 24 was the Search Console total for the last 3 months on 18 July 2026, and 326 was the total for the last 3 months on 24 September 2026. What mattered most were city × industry service pages, articles in 6 languages and solid technical basics; what does not work yet are competitive national searches, where a young domain still lacks authority.

We are a small web studio from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. We build websites (from €290) and do SEO for businesses across Romania, working remotely. We publish our own site's numbers because we can show them in full, including the parts that do not work yet. In absolute terms this is not a spectacular success, but it is clear growth, measured the same way each time, and we show it step by step below.

The numbers: three Search Console measurements

We recorded the same values from Google Search Console three times, each time for the last 3 months:

Each row is the 3-month total on that date, so the windows partly overlap. Month by month, clicks were 69 in July, 128 in August and another 128 in September, but in only 24 days. The average position dropped from 47.8 to 30.7, which means the site shows up higher on average. It is an average across every search you appear in, so the direction matters more than the exact value.

If you want to track the same numbers for your own site, our guide to Google Search Console shows where to find each one.

What we did

We worked on the site between June and September 2026, along four lines.

Technical basics. Structured data, a sitemap, hreflang for the site's 6 languages and Core Web Vitals (page speed and stability). Ahrefs Site Audit gave the site a health score of 100/100, which only means the tool found no technical errors. The score does not bring rankings by itself, but a clean base helps Google find and correctly understand the rest of the pages.

Articles in 6 languages, published in daily waves. About 1,046 articles on the questions businesses have when they get a website: what it costs, which pages it needs, local SEO, Google Business Profile. They did not go live all at once, but gradually, in waves published day by day.

City × industry service pages. Pages along the lines of "website for [industry] in [city]", for example "Website for a Law Firm in Arad", each for one combination of industry and city. By 24 September there were 260 of them.

Internal links and IndexNow. Articles link to the matching service pages, and new URLs are submitted automatically through IndexNow to Bing and Yandex. Google does not use IndexNow; for Google, the sitemap and Search Console are what matter.

What worked

City × industry pages did much better than the articles. In the 24 September export they had an average position of 15.6 and a CTR (the share of impressions that become clicks) of about 2.6%, roughly four times the blog articles' 0.7%. Four Cluj pages had average positions between 2 and 5. A likely explanation: someone searching for a service in a specific city is already close to a decision, and a page that matches that exact search has a better chance of getting the click than a general article.

Google shows the site for far more searches. Impressions over 3 months grew from 5,420 to 49,600, more than nine times as many. Impressions do not pay invoices, but without them there are no clicks either.

Quote requests came in from Google. On 21 September 2026, two quote requests arrived on the same day from people who found us through Google search. That is a small number, but it shows the thing that actually matters: the traffic brings real requests, not just visits.

What has not worked yet

• Competitive national searches. For searches such as "preț site web" (website price), the site was still around position 85. There, domain authority matters a lot: the trust Google gives a site over time, largely through links from other sites.
• Authority. A new domain does not have it, and content and technical work do not replace it. It is built slowly, through links and mentions from relevant sites; we explain how in our article on what backlinks are and how to get them.
• The absolute numbers are still small. 326 clicks in 3 months means a few clicks per day. The growth is real, but it starts from a very low base.
• Most clicks come from articles in other languages. That visibility is useful, but we work mainly for businesses in Romania, so we do not confuse it with the demand we are after.

What comes next

• Cut-off titles. After 24 September we rewrote 5,703 article titles that Google was showing truncated. The effect is not measured yet.
• More attention for city × industry pages. Their CTR is about four times that of the articles, so they get priority, together with the links from articles to them.
• Authority, built cleanly. Links and mentions from relevant sites, few and good, not packages of hundreds of links.
• The next measurement. We repeat the same numbers over the same 3-month window, so the comparison stays fair.

What you can apply to your own site

You do not need over a thousand articles to grow. For a local business, the useful lessons from our case are simpler:

• Fix the technical basics first. Sitemap, structured data, speed. This usually takes 2–4 weeks.
• Create one page for each service in each city you genuinely cover. On our site, pages like these had a CTR about four times higher than the articles. Each one has to be useful for that city, not a copy with a different city name.
• Link your articles to the pages that sell. Articles bring visits; internal links take readers to the page where they can ask for a quote.
• Measure in 3-month windows, not day to day. Rankings usually move within 3–6 months.
• Start with your city and your niche. The big national searches come later, once the site has authority.

If you want help with your own site, our SEO packages are: SEO Foundation, a one-off payment from €240 (€440 with optimization for AI search), Local from €120/month and Growth from €240/month. The monthly packages have no minimum term: we bill monthly, with 30 days' notice, and any month in which we did not deliver what was agreed is refunded. We do not guarantee rankings, because nobody can honestly guarantee them. To compare with the rest of the market, see how much SEO costs in 2026.

You can start with a free mini-audit on WhatsApp. All the details are on our SEO services page.