Indexed but Not Getting Traffic? How to Finally Get Real Visitors

When I launched my website, I carefully submitted each page to Google Search Console, optimised meta tags, set up internal linking, and published content in both English and French. My goal? For each page to be indexed quickly by Google LLC, to capture international and meaningful organic traffic. In late December 2024, I recorded just 90 visitors per month coming from Google.

Shortly thereafter, in less than a month of focused SEO work — refining my technical setup, improving international versioning and language architecture — my Google-driven visitors climbed to 1 500 per month, with 521 visitor from Google and 100 from IA. That’s nearly a five-fold increase, and while still modest in absolute terms, it underscored a clear shift: indexation alone wasn’t the goal — traffic and real user visits were.

Putting those figures into wider perspective: recent data suggest that for many websites, the road to traction is long. According to a study, over 55 % of bloggers stated it took three to nine months for a new blog to gain initial traction. Meanwhile, benchmark reports show that organic search will account for around 53 % of all website traffic in 2025. Yet, many sites still struggle to convert being “indexed” into being “visited” — one dataset indicates that organic search contributes just 17 % of overall website traffic on average in some sectors.

These comparisons highlight a few insights:

• While being indexed is important, it is only step one. My jump from 90 to 1500 shows how much optimisation beyond indexation matters.

• Many sites with access to the web for some time still don’t achieve meaningful organic traffic — so my result, though modest, is ahead of what many observe early on.

• The broader environment is changing: with AI-driven search features and “zero-click” behaviours growing, gaining real clicks is more challenging today.

In other words: being in Google’s index is no longer enough. What matters is being visible, being crawled often enough, being relevant in the right country version / language and being aligned with actual user search intent. So I shifted my focus from “number of indexed pages” to “users by country, by language version, the right internal linking, the crawl budget, and the signal to Google that this page deserves more than a placeholder status.”

In this article I’ll share how I discovered that indexation is only the beginning — not the end — of an SEO journey. We’ll explore the technical and strategic hurdles that indexation alone doesn’t clear, and how to pivot toward pages that are actually visited (and not merely “in the index”). We’ll dive into concepts like crawl budget, international versions, language/geolocation versions, and how some pages that are indexed still remain invisible — and how either to optimise them or remove them.

Being Indexed is Not Enough in a Saturated Market

If my website had been purely commercial, with a generic blog and neutral articles that did not bring a strong professional perspective, I would never have been able to gain visibility in SEO. Not in France, and even less in the English-speaking world. The digital landscape is crowded. In France alone, more than twelve thousand digital agencies compete for the same keywords, not to mention countless independent consultants who claim SEO expertise. The English-speaking market is even more mature, with fierce competition and a much higher threshold of expertise expected from content.

In this context, simply being indexed by Google LLC does not provide any strategic advantage. To stand out, especially during the first months of a site’s existence, content must deliver genuine expertise, targeted insight and a clear positioning.

A young website is not granted the same level of trust or attention as a long-established authority site. Without a strong professional standpoint, my pages would have been pushed to the bottom of a search engine index that is already overflowing with articles covering the same topics.

This is why I deliberately chose to publish content that speaks to real business use cases, grounded in field experience rather than generic checklists. Each article had to justify its existence by responding to a real, specific search intent. Not broad advice such as “How to do marketing better,” but thought-out analyses addressing concrete issues for professionals, with a level of nuance and depth that pure copywriting or automated generation cannot replicate.

The visibility I gained owes nothing to luck. It comes from the fact that my content offers something recognisable and valuable in a space where most texts resemble each other. After years of marketing and sales experience, publishing a blog was not about summarising what others already say. It was about translating business reality into digital strategies that actually matter. And in doing so, signalling to Google that my pages were not just “one more voice,” but pages that deserved attention, crawling and eventually clicks from real users.

When my Google organic traffic grew from 90 to 435 monthly visitors in less than a month of SEO refinement, it showed me that Google rewards clarity of purpose and relevance. Yet this improvement also revealed another crucial truth: even well-written and properly indexed pages are not guaranteed to be shown or visited. To reach real users, a page must prove its usefulness again and again. That requires not only indexation, but sustained alignment with what people are searching for, where they are searching from, and in the language and cultural context that matters to them.

From Invisible Pages to 20-Minute Reads: How Specialised Content Wins

Very early on I realised that my brand-new website faced a steep uphill battle against content from established players. In a market crowded with agencies, freelancers and consultants — both in France and across the English-speaking world — publishing standard professional content would not have been enough. Generic pillar pages, created to capture fleeting clicks, would simply not stand out — and the backlink investment required to push them would have been disproportionate to the return.

What I understood was this: if I wanted to succeed, I had to appeal to Google and its users not with “just another article”, but with something distinctive — my in-depth professional expertise, real experience in specific sectors, and a territorial + social-economy (ESS/CSR) perspective where competitors and generic AI-generated content had very little chance of matching. I therefore developed content that aligned tightly with my marketing positioning: combining business strategy, social and solidarity economy dimensions, and deep local-sector knowledge.

The results followed. While many “basic professional” pages elsewhere have reader dwell times of only 15-30 seconds (which suggests minimal engagement and limited value signal) — I observed that the more specialised my articles became, the longer the reading times climbed, some reaching 20 minutes or more. This translated into stronger recognition through the E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), which signals to Google that the content is not just present, but valuable. In effect, a clear diptych emerged: on one hand, standard content with short dwell times, low engagement and minimal visibility; on the other hand my specialised pages, high dwell times, elevated user engagement and accelerating SEO traction.

Adapting Content to Local and Linguistic Search Intent

I quickly realised that my new website had no chance of competing with the content published by long-established agencies and consultants. There was no point in producing generic pillar pages that would only generate a few seconds of traffic, nor in investing a disproportionate backlink budget to push them artificially. Instead, I decided to win over Google and its users through expertise and real-world experience in areas where my competitors would never be able to produce an identical level of content—nor even replicate it with AI. I wrote articles that reflected my strategic positioning, blending business, CSR and the Social and Solidarity Economy (ESS), all grounded in deep territorial and sector-specific knowledge. The results spoke for themselves: the more specialised my content became, the longer users stayed on page—some articles exceeding 20 minutes of reading time—which strengthened my site’s E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness).

But beyond this qualitative differentiation, I realised there was another crucial layer: search intent varies across countries and languages. A query translated word-for-word may fail entirely to respond to actual user needs in another market. A recent study notes that in some English-speaking markets, users search with immediate transactional intent, whereas in countries like Germany or Japan, they take more time, compare options and look for reliability. In other words: what people search for in the UK, the US and France is simply not the same.

This led to a true shift in mindset. Writing should not be about letting the “lyrical pen” express itself freely, but about being found—starting from what real users are searching for, in their own language and cultural context. Jacques Lacan famously said he wrote “not to be read, but to be studied.” In SEO, the motto would be: write to be searched. If nobody types the query your content targets, the greatest piece of writing remains invisible.

So I began aligning my keyword research, article topics, and language versions with search volumes that were still underserved, particularly in international markets, rather than fighting oversaturated queries in my primary country. This strategy allowed me to uncover less competitive angles, attract both Google’s and readers’ attention, and gradually build genuine international visibility.

The Crawl Budget Reality: Why You’re Not Automatically Seen by Google

After the abrupt assumption that “I’ve written the article, so Google will show it”, I quickly learned that nothing is guaranteed. Even though I created a page four months ago, earned a quality backlink and built it with care around LinkedIn optimisation, the first organic visitor from Google only came through today—just one person. This delay illustrated an important technical truth: the website does not immediately gain priority in Google’s ecosystem simply because you publish relevant content. Google assigns each site a “crawl budget”, essentially the number of pages it is willing and able to crawl within a given timeframe. A page may exist, yet Google still needs time to decide whether to crawl it frequently, index it deeply and present it to real users. If the site is young, the domain authority low, or competing pages overwhelming, being published becomes only the first step in a longer process.

Furthermore, even when a page shows intent and external links, this does not reverse the ecosystem in one sweep. In highly competitive queries—especially those dominated by large sites with high DA or AS—your signals of credibility (social media mentions, activity on your Google Business Profile, interactions, etc.) help strengthen but cannot instantly offset longstanding authority. From my own experience, the single visitor I received after months is a reminder: Google’s crawling and indexing patterns are selective, gradual and influenced by many unseen factors. The crawl rate depends on both the site’s “crawl limit” (what it can handle technically) and “crawl demand” (what Google thinks is worth revisiting). Unless the site proves it deserves more frequent attention—through engagement, relevance, freshness, and structural strength—it will remain in a waiting phase.

In other words, one must abandon the belief that visibility is automatic. Publishing is not the finish line—it is the starting line. Patience, consistent reinforcement of user signals, ongoing refinement of the site architecture and external validation all matter. Until Google starts crawling the right pages regularly, you may see only a trickle of visits, no matter how excellent the content might be.

Conclusion: The Long View of SEO

I won’t hand you all my secrets, but I will assure you: you are not alone. Every website that ventures into SEO faces the same reality. Like a life of prayer or contemplative devotion, SEO demands patience, humility, consistency, and sometimes methodical discipline. Over time, the traffic will come—if all the pieces align.

Consider this: even after my efforts, it took months before I saw those first meaningful visitors. And remember that many competitors—especially large firms—possess considerable financial resources, making it easier for them to accelerate their SEO efforts via large backlink budgets, paid content campaigns, technical overhauls and expansive site infrastructures. Industry benchmarks show that companies spending $10,000 to $50,000 monthly on SEO and content promotion may see significant gains within 3 to 6 months, whereas smaller firms may only see measurable lift after 9 to 12 months, if they stay consistent.

For a small business like yours or mine, nothing is guaranteed. Visibility is earned meticulously, not gifted automatically. The digital landscape is crowded, the algorithms constantly evolving. Yet if you commit to writing thoughtful, unique content, aligned with real user intent by language and geography, build your site architecture properly, and let your signals of credibility grow steadily—then you can compete too.

In the end, the traffic you seek is a patient accumulation of small wins: one well-read article, one meaningful backlink, one regionally targeted visitor after another. Keep the faith, remain vigilant, refine your methods, and you’ll build something lasting.