It's 2024, and most developers and indie hackers are aware that you can't just build something, tell a few friends and expect to go viral.
But just in-case, I've gone ahead and built version one of Swell Diary, the daily surf videos website and launched it in stealth mode with no marketing. This has allowed me to establish a baseline to improve upon.
TL;DR baseline stats for September 2024
Stats from the end of, or recorded during the month of September 2024, before any marketing efforts have been undertaken.
- Indexed pages: 461
- De-indexed pages: 291
- Unique visitors: 19 (16 New)
- Sessions: 53
- Average SERPs: 62.2
- SERP Clicks: 9
- SERP Impressions: 571
- Backlink domains: 4
- Authority score: 2
Basic marketing tools to measure the baseline
To measure the sites baseline I'm using a few industry standard tools. These are either all free to use or have a free tier. Here's the key things I want to know:
- How many people visit the website
- Where they come from
- Is Google indexing the website
- How is the website performing on search engines
And here's what I'm using:
Google Analytics
This is essential for measuring daily users and traffic numbers, page views and traffic sources. It's free to use and easy to set up with a snippet of code.
Google Search Console
Keep track of pages being indexed by Google and get vital information on keywords that rank and search engine results positions (SERPs). This service is also free and easy to set up.
Semrush (Free account)
Semrush is one of the leading, all inclusive, SEO tools. To get started I am interested in the websites authority score and backlinks. For this you can get away with the free account.
Getting indexed on Google
Despite what SEO consultants might tell you it is actually very easy to get indexed on Google. There is no secret or complicated process, and no, agencies and consultancies do not have agreements or a back door to Google.
So how do you get indexed on Google? Do nothing.
This is exactly what I did and one way or another Google found the website and began crawling each and every page of the website and indexing them. This was before adding a sitemap to Google Search Console.
Google de-indexing issue
It's worth noting that initially all pages were indexed. Then Google started de-indexing pages. I suspect this is because the pages are created programmatically and there is not enough distinct content on each page. This is something I will fix later.
Visitor analytics
Following the website getting indexed, here's a summary of visitor analytics for the month of September. This is based on a stealth launch and no marketing activity, except for outreach to about ten YouTube channel owners.
Traffic summary
19 active users and 16 new users. One or two of those active users will be me.
Users and user acquisition sources
Surprisingly 12 users came direct and only 6 from search engines. I did reach out to a few of the YouTube channel owners during September which may have increased direct traffic. The Instagram referral is from my YouTube outreach.
User sessions and acquisition sources
There were a total of 53 sessions which means repeat visitors, Quite a few of these will be me however. The YouTube and Instagram referrals are possibly from my outreach.
Search engine performance
I've used Google Search Console to get a quick handle on rankings, keywords and top pages for the month of September.
Search summary
The site is buried right now with an average position of 62.2, so clicks and impressions are also low.
Top ranking search queries
The site is getting impressions and some decent keywords are being picked up but the positions are really bad.
Top ranking pages and positions
The home page and a few surf spots are ranking, but again positions are bad. Surf spots might be the best pages to optimise first.
Primary keyword ranking
The home page is getting picked up for the keyword term daily surf videos. This is by design, and a good start. But it's ranking at position 51.
Backlinks and authority score
A couple of quick snapshots from Semrush showing the backlinks and authority score. Backlinks will be critical for the early stages of marketing to kick start decent rankings.
July 2024
As far back as July the website had a backlink, most likely a bot or spam site based in Vietnam. The backlink occurred organically. It did the trick of making the site indexable by Google. The referring site no longer exists however.
September 2024
I took this screenshot on 1st October and it shows with 4 referring domains the website has an authority score of 2. All backlinks were acquired organically and likely low quality.
No, they won't come
Every website and situation will be different, but this baseline clearly shows that no-one, or very few people will visit your website if you launch and do nothing.
It's interesting to note that the site did get indexed, ranks, and acquired backlinks without any effort. However, the impact of these has resulted in minimal traffic.
It's time to start marketing!