New Website SEO: What Our First Six Weeks in Search Console Showed

Quick answer: In its first six weeks on Google (13 September to 20 October 2026), wowdigital.com.au earned 7,099 impressions and 10 clicks. Daily impressions grew from about 36 a day in the first week to about 880 a day by 20 October. Clicks did not follow, because the average position stayed around 60: 97% of impressions on the searches Google listed came at position 21 or lower, where almost nobody looks. The biggest jumps came days after we published new service pages. For a new website, impressions arrive long before clicks do.

This is our own site's data, exported from Google Search Console on 23 October 2026. We use our own site as the first test case for what we recommend to clients, and we publish the results whether they flatter us or not. Every figure below comes from that export unless a source says otherwise, and the limits of the data are set out at the end.

Six weeks in Google Search Console: the totals

Measure	13 September to 20 October 2026
Impressions	7,099
Clicks	10
Click-through rate	0.14%
Average position	About 61
Searches listed	933
Pages with impressions	59
Impressions from Australia	92%
Impressions on desktop	81%

An impression is counted each time a link to the site appears on a Google results page, whether or not anyone scrolls far enough to see it. Google defines average position as "the average position of the topmost result from your site" (Search Console Help). An average of about 61 means a typical result sat on page six or seven.

Impressions grew 24 times over. Clicks didn't.

Week by week, impressions climbed while the average position moved around without a trend:

Week	Dates	Impressions	Per day	Average position	Clicks	What went live
1	13 to 19 Sep	254	36	66	4	9 city pages (18 Sep)
2	20 to 26 Sep	497	71	75	2
3	27 Sep to 3 Oct	670	96	46	0	Web Design Adelaide and three related service pages (27 Sep); technical fixes (2 Oct)
4	4 to 10 Oct	1,100	157	62	0	New and rewritten blog posts (3 to 5 Oct)
5	11 to 17 Oct	1,939	277	56	2	7 Shopify pages (14 Oct); 5 AI SEO pages (16 Oct)
6 (3 days)	18 to 20 Oct	2,639	880	65	2

Weekly average positions are our own calculation, weighting Search Console's daily averages by impressions, so treat them as approximate.

Impressions per day rose about 24-fold, from 36 to 880. The average position swung between 46 and 75 and ended about where it started. Our reading is that Google was trying the pages for a widening set of searches, most of them at deep positions, so each new batch of impressions arrived at position 60 or worse. Rising impressions with a flat average position looked like a site being tested, not a site ranking.

Why there were almost no clicks: position

Of the 6,781 impressions on searches Search Console lists:

• 1.4% were on page one (positions 1 to 10)
• 1.9% were on page two (positions 11 to 20)
• 96.7% were at position 21 or lower, including 72.1% at position 51 or lower

Almost none of our impressions were on a page people normally reach, so a 0.14% click-through rate at an average position of 61 is no surprise. On a new site, "impressions but no clicks" is rarely a sign that the title or description is weak. It is a sign the page isn't high enough for anyone to read them.

The clicks we did get tell the same story. Seven of the 10 landed on the homepage, two of them on its old http:// address. The only click Search Console ties to a search came from "wow digital", our own name, where the site sits at position 2.3. The other three clicks went to the Shopify development page, the Darwin location page and the About page.

For contrast, when a site does reach the positions people see, clicks and enquiries follow. A client of ours, MLBE Power, reports about 55% more clicks from search and 50% more enquiries since its rebuild; the detail is in the MLBE Power case study.

New service pages moved the numbers most

Page type	Pages	Share of page impressions	Range of average positions
Service pages (web design, Shopify, AI SEO)	16	72%	46 to 80
Blog posts and the blog index	26	20%	6 to 79
City location pages and their index	10	5%	17 to 94
Home, about, contact and projects	7	3%	2 to 15

Shares are of the Pages report total, which counts impressions page by page and adds up to 7,924.

The two biggest jumps in the chart came days after new service pages went live:

• 2 October: daily impressions doubled, from 88 to 178, five days after the Web Design Adelaide page and its three related pages were published. It was also the day we shipped technical fixes, so we can't separate the two.
• 17 and 18 October: impressions went from 374 to 830 in two days, just after 12 new pages for Shopify development and AI SEO went live on 14 and 16 October.

Those 12 pages collected about 2,700 impressions in their first week or less, about a third of all page impressions in the six weeks. They arrived low, though: the Shopify pages averaged positions 51 to 79 and the AI SEO pages 55 to 80. Impressions came quickly; rankings did not.

The single page with the most impressions was Small Business Web Design Adelaide, with 1,501 at an average position of 59. We can't prove cause from this data, because new pages, blog updates and Google's own changes overlapped. But the timing lined up both times: on our site, a page for a service we sell did more for impressions than another blog post.

The searches closest to page one are long and specific

Most impressions

Search	Impressions	Average position
web design adelaide	413	61
ai seo	270	75
ai seo services	191	87
website design adelaide small business	156	49

Closest to page one

Search	Impressions	Average position
wordpress website design adelaide	45	14
website developer adelaide	17	7.5
ecommerce website development agency	3	6.7
is shopify or wordpress better	5	1.8

The broad, competitive searches at the top brought the most impressions, at positions 49 to 87. The searches already on page one or two are longer and more specific, with only a handful of impressions each.

For a new site, those long searches are the ones to work on first. A page at position 7.5 for "website developer adelaide" needs a nudge. A page at position 75 for "ai seo" needs months of authority before it can compete.

Why Search Console doesn't list every search

Google says "some queries (called anonymized queries) are not included in Search Console data to protect the privacy of the user making the query". It describes them as queries "that aren't issued by more than a few dozen users over a two-to-three month period" (Google Search Central Blog).

In our export, the 933 listed searches covered 6,781 of 7,099 impressions, about 95%. They covered only one of the 10 clicks. On a small, new site, many of the searches that turn into visits are rare ones Google won't show you, so don't conclude a page gets no search traffic just because no search appears next to its clicks.

How long does SEO take for a new website?

Google's own answer is that "some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months", and it suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change worked (Google's SEO Starter Guide).

On our site, the timeline so far looks like this:

• Within a week: new pages collected their first impressions. Each went into the sitemap as soon as it was published, and we requested indexing for them in Search Console.
• Over the following weeks: impressions kept climbing as Google tried the pages for more searches.
• Not yet: page-one positions for competitive searches such as "web design adelaide". After six weeks, the average position has not improved.

That matches what we tell clients: expect impressions within weeks and enquiries over months, with no guaranteed date for either.

What we changed because of the data

1. We stopped judging titles by click-through rate at position 60. We did rewrite our titles and descriptions on 23 October to match what page-one results show, such as prices, experience and a phone number. That will matter once pages reach page one, and we'll judge it only on searches where they do.
2. We're building pages for demand that has nowhere to land. Keyword research in Semrush (Australia, October 2026) showed about 7,900 searches a month for "seo adelaide", "seo agency adelaide" and "seo services adelaide" combined, and no matching page on our site. We have since built SEO Adelaide and local SEO Adelaide pages to fill that gap.
3. We're putting authority ahead of more posts. Positions around 60 point to a site Google doesn't trust much yet. That is built with a Google Business Profile, directory listings, genuine reviews and mentions from other sites. Our guide to choosing a local SEO agency covers what that work involves.
4. We watch the long searches near page one, such as "website developer adelaide", and improve those pages first.

If your new site has impressions but no clicks

1. Look at position search by search, not the site-wide average.
2. Separate searches for your business name from everything else.
3. Find the searches at positions 5 to 20. Those are the ones a better page can move.
4. Check new pages are indexed with Search Console's URL Inspection tool, and that they're in your sitemap.
5. Don't rewrite titles to fix click-through rate on searches where you rank below page two.
6. Compare like-for-like periods. Daily numbers on a young site jump around: ours fell from 233 to 53 in four days in early October.
7. Give each change a few weeks before you judge it, as Google suggests.

Our technical SEO checklist covers the crawling and indexing checks, our page speed case study covers one of the technical fixes from week three, and our SEO content strategy guide covers deciding which pages to build next.

Want the same look at your own Search Console data? We'll go through it with you as part of a free website and SEO audit and show you which searches are closest to page one.

How we collected the data, and its limits

• Source: the Google Search Console Performance report for wowdigital.com.au, search type Web, date range "Last 3 months", exported on 23 October 2026. The domain's first impressions were on 13 September. Search Console data runs a few days behind, so the export ends on 20 October.
• One site, small numbers. With 10 clicks, any percentage about clicks means little.
• Average position is an average of the topmost result across many searches. It is not the ranking for any one keyword.
• Weekly positions are our own impression-weighted calculation from the daily figures.
• Timing is not proof of cause. New pages, technical fixes, blog posts and Google's own changes overlapped.
• Not every impression may be a person. 81% of impressions were on desktop, many at deep positions. Some may come from automated rank-tracking tools, and Search Console doesn't say which.

We'll update this post with the next export, including whether the 23 October title changes made any difference once pages reach page one.