Search for what a new website's Search Console data should look like after two weeks and you get advice, not data. Here is the data. rank.fast went live on 21 August on a domain with no history. Every Sunday we now pull the full Search Console record into one report, and every Monday the public half of it goes here. This is the first one.
The short version: impressions went from single digits a day to around fifty. Google is now showing the site for 87 different queries a week, up from 30. Clicks are close to zero, and positions are mostly in the 60s to 90s. That is not a site ranking; it is a site being auditioned, and it is what two weeks should look like.
The numbers
| Week to 5 Sept | Week before | |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 311 | 61 |
| Clicks | 1 | 2 |
| Distinct queries | 87 | 30 |
| Pages with impressions | 13 | 8 |
Query-level figures. Search Console hides some queries for privacy, so the site-wide total is higher: 800 impressions and 44 clicks since launch, with almost all the clicks from the UK on the brand name or on hidden queries. Some of those were us checking our own results.
Day by day
| Day | Impressions | Clicks | Queries |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Aug | 7 | 0 | 5 |
| 24 Aug | 4 | 0 | 3 |
| 26 Aug | 4 | 0 | 3 |
| 27 Aug | 9 | 0 | 7 |
| 28 Aug | 17 | 2 | 13 |
| 29 Aug | 20 | 0 | 13 |
| 30 Aug | 17 | 0 | 12 |
| 31 Aug | 31 | 1 | 28 |
| 1 Sept | 45 | 0 | 33 |
| 2 Sept | 62 | 0 | 25 |
| 3 Sept | 59 | 0 | 19 |
| 4 Sept | 51 | 0 | 16 |
| 5 Sept | 46 | 0 | 20 |
The step up on 28 August is the day the first guest posts went live and the day the free audit tool published. We cannot separate the two, and the honest reading is that new pages brought new auditions and the links have not had time to do anything yet.
What Google is auditioning us for
One page accounts for two thirds of everything. The free technical SEO audit drew 215 impressions on 35 queries this week, from zero the week before, and every one of those queries is a version of the same intent: free SEO audit report PDF, SEO analysis report PDF, technical SEO audit report, website audit PDF. Positions run from 59 to 89. Google has decided what the page is about, is showing it to a few people a day far down the results, and is watching what happens.
We did one thing in response. The page's heading said "free technical SEO audit" and the queries all say "report", so on Thursday the heading became "free technical SEO audit report (PDF)" and the first line now says what arrives and how. That is the whole intervention, and next week's table will say whether it mattered.
The rest of the picture:
- The long-tail post holds 12 queries in the 50s to 80s, unchanged in a fortnight.
- The free tools listicle has 16 queries in its first week, including two at position 9 and 10 on single impressions, which is the closest anything non-brand has come to page one.
- The marketplace study keeps being tested for "buy PBN backlinks" and "expired domains for PBN". Google reads "we screened 159,736 backlink listings" as PBN territory. We are not going to write for those searchers, so those auditions can fail.
The brand name, in two countries
For "rank fast" the site sits around position 5 in the UK, where 25 of the 29 brand impressions came from. In the United States it is not in the top ten at all. That page is occupied by companies that share the name: an agency in New York, a web design firm, a search marketing company with LinkedIn and Instagram pages, and a UK company register entry for a business called Rank Fast SEO Ltd that is not us. An exact-match domain gets a new site onto page one in its home country in two weeks. Everywhere else, the name is earned like any other term.
Where the visitors actually came from
Search sent 9 of 124 sessions this week. Reddit sent 24, X sent 25, LinkedIn 8, and 9 came from the one guest post published on a technology news site on Thursday. Two weeks in, the audience is entirely social and referral, and the search numbers above are the leading indicator, not the traffic.
What this proves, and what it does not
- It shows what a new site's first fortnight in Search Console looks like when the pages are indexed within minutes of publishing: impressions in the tens per day, dozens of queries, positions in the 60s to 90s, near-zero clicks.
- It shows that one focused tool page can become the site's first query cluster inside a week, before any link points at it.
- It does not show ranking. No non-brand term is on page one. The links that might change that went live between one and ten days ago, and the pilot's 30-day checks are the first point at which their effect can honestly be read.
- One fortnight is one fortnight. This report repeats every Monday, and the tables will be published whichever direction they move.