May 2026
CurrentWhat I Did
- Built and shipped six new city-specific location pages — Athens, Hartselle, Cullman, Florence, Muscle Shoals, and Sheffield. The site now has dedicated pages for all 9 cities I target across North Alabama.
- Submitted the sitemap to Google Search Console. Within a week Google indexed 10 pages and started surfacing them for real searches.
- Ran a full QA audit across all 9 location pages — caught a duplicate-content problem on three of them that would have made Google treat the set as doorway pages. Fixed it before the pages had time to accumulate any ranking history under that flag.
- Published one new article: small business website design.
- Continued cold call sprint work and prospect research workflow.
What's Working
- The site is no longer invisible. After the sitemap submission, weekly impressions jumped from near zero to 147. Indexed pages went from 2 to 10 in seven days.
- Average search position is at 66.7 — roughly page 7 of Google — and the trendline is moving down (better) week over week. That's exactly the early-stage curve you want.
- Queries surfacing the site are real commercial-intent searches: "how much does marketing for plumbers cost," "google business profile optimization for contractors," "website design for contractor mobile." These are the people I built this site for.
- The articles I wrote in March and April are the ones pulling impressions now. Two to three months from publish date is when content marketing actually starts to bend the curve. Right on schedule.
What's Not
- Still zero clicks. 147 impressions, 0 clicks. At position 66 you're below the fold on page 7 — almost nobody scrolls that far. Clicks don't start happening until average position breaks into the top 20.
- Location pages haven't started ranking yet. Only one of the nine (Huntsville) cracked the top-pages report this week, and it's at 7 impressions. The other eight need more time to be discovered and weighted by Google.
- Founding Client Program: still 3 spots open. No one's signed yet.
- External backlinks: still zero. This is the biggest missing piece of the puzzle and the slowest one to fix honestly.
What I Learned This Month
Building nine location pages quickly is efficient. It's also dangerous. When you're writing pages with the same structure for the same business in different cities, it's easy to let paragraphs drift toward boilerplate — same "what we do" section, same "how we're different from a marketing agency" section, same closing pitch with the city name swapped. That's the doorway-page pattern Google penalizes, and I had it on three of my own pages before I caught it.
The QA audit caught a 75-word paragraph duplicated verbatim across four pages, plus several near-duplicate closers. Fixed it by rewriting each page's shared paragraphs to anchor in that city's specific competitive thesis. The lesson is one I'm going to apply to every multi-city build going forward: write each page like it's the only one, then audit for duplicates before you ship.
The Honest Read
Three months in. 24 pages live (15 articles + 9 location pages + homepage). 147 weekly impressions, zero clicks, average position 66.7. The numbers are small but they are the right shape — impressions climbing, position improving, indexed pages multiplying. This is what month three looks like for almost everyone doing content marketing the right way. The temptation is to look at zero clicks and chase ads. The discipline is to keep stacking shovels of dirt and trust the math.
Two more months at this pace and the site is reasonably likely to be pulling its first clicks. Six more months and it should be ranking on the first page for some of the easier keywords. That's not a guarantee — but it's the curve, and the curve is currently bending the right way.
Next Month's Focus
- Move to a steady weekly publishing cadence — one Wednesday, one Saturday — instead of batch drops.
- Finish local citation build: Yelp, BBB, Nextdoor, Manta, Chamber of Commerce, Angi (the one I bash, on principle, but still needs claiming).
- Real outreach for backlinks — guest posts, podcast interviews, anywhere a contractor-marketing voice fits. This is the unsexy fundraising part of SEO.
- Land the first Founding Client. Even one signed deal validates the model and gives me a case study to write about.
- Watch the location pages start to rank. If by end of June any of the nine are still showing zero impressions individually, audit that page specifically.