My Rebuild in Public Numbers, the Month Traffic Crossed Half a Million

In this blog post I am going to show you the real numbers from my rebuild in public. Not the polished ones. The actual Search Console figures, the worst and the best, including the week my whole website was seen 22,054 times and I sat there wondering if I had finally killed the thing for good.

There is a version of my story that reads like a business masterclass. Twenty-one years in. Forbes Top 20. Built, scaled and sold an agency. Clients like IBM, Twitter and Dropbox. A website that once pulled over 600,000 visits a month and paid me while I slept. That version is true. It is just not the whole truth. The whole truth is that the money vanished, my body gave out, and I have spent the last few months finding out whether any of it could be rebuilt. In public. Where you can all watch me either pull it off or fall over trying.

People are nosy about numbers. So am I. I will read anyone's honest Search Console screenshot before another clever thread about where search is going. So here is mine, no makeup, the good and the frankly humiliating. This is the numbers chapter of my rebuild in public. But the numbers mean nothing until you know what they cost me. So let me start there.

First, the story so far

If you have just landed here, welcome. This is Week 13 of my rebuild in public, a series where I tear my website back to the studs and put it together again with nothing airbrushed out. Here is every week so far. Start anywhere, they all stand on their own.

• Week 1. I de-indexed 1,300 pages to save my website. People questioned my sanity. So did I, for about an hour.
• Week 2. My open rate crashed to 11%, and I had not done a single thing wrong.
• Week 3. The unglamorous SEO work nobody talks about, because somebody has to.
• Week 4. A full content audit, deciding what was worth saving and what was landfill.
• Week 5. I took my open rate from 11% to 70%. Yes, really.
• Week 6. The week I conquered my inbox instead of my blog, and refused to feel guilty about it.
• Week 7. The income stream that has saved my business three times.
• Week 8. I let a fresh set of eyes loose on my whole site, then went and did my hair.
• Week 9. I redesigned the whole newsletter. The open rate held. The click rate fell off a cliff.
• Week 10. I built a tool to speed up my publishing and got 400 hours of my life back.
• Week 11. I dug 786 of those de-indexed pages back out and back into Google.
• Week 12. I finally got my inbox under control for good.

Or you can binge the whole series in one place. Your call. Right. Now the numbers. But first, why any of this exists at all.

How it died, and how it nearly took me with it

I lost my income overnight.

Well. Overnight is how it felt. The truth is it drained away over six to nine months, which is somehow worse, because you get to stand there and watch it go. For ten years this website paid me five to seven thousand dollars a month in passive income, from sponsored posts and link placements, while I got on with my life. That is the kind of money that lets you breathe. Then it stopped.

Here is the part that still makes me laugh in the bad way. My traffic did not even fully vanish first. What happened was that the tools sponsors use to vet you, the Ahrefs and Semrush of this world, started reporting my site as a ghost of itself. The sponsor runs the automated check, the check says she is finished, and the money walks. Ten years of passive income gone, because a third-party tool decided my website looked dead. I wrote about the start of that mess in Week 1, when I de-indexed 1,300 pages on purpose, because sometimes you have to shrink a thing right down before it will grow again.

Now lay this over the top of it. I have spent two of the last few years in a wheelchair. My back gave out. I lost fifty-five kilos clawing my way back to well, which is a full-time job nobody pays you for. And all of it happened against a war, with the sirens and the broken sleep and the low hum of dread that never quite switches off. So when the income went, it did not go in isolation. It went while I was already on the floor. Some weeks, literally.

You cannot explain what that does to you unless it has happened to you. It is not the money you feel first. It is the floor. The one you had been standing on for years, the one you stopped noticing because it had always held. One day you look down and it is gone, and you are still standing exactly where you were, except now you are falling. And I did not know if I could stop the fall, or whether I was just pouring money into a website that was already a graveyard.

So I ran an experiment.

That is all it was at the start. One experiment, to see if I could move the needle even a little. The needle moved. So I ran another. And another. And somewhere in there the experiment stopped being an experiment and turned into the thing I think about in the shower, on my walks, on my runs, and at 4am when I should be asleep. An obsession. The useful kind. The kind that drags you out of a hole one inch at a time.

Here is where that obsession has got me.

That orange line is not a mock-up I knocked up to look clever. That is my actual Search Console, the real daily ups and downs and all. Over a million impressions across six months, a long flat misery through the spring, and then the bit on the right where it finally takes off.

The six months that nearly broke me

Look at that graph again. See the long flat stretch through the spring, where the line crawls along the floor and then sags lower still? Live that in real time, refreshing it every single morning, and I will give you the only honest word for it. Soul-destroying.

I came so close to stopping right there. I had poured money and hope into a website that, by every number on the screen, was flat on its back. Every morning I looked and it had not moved, or it had moved the wrong way, and every morning the same small voice said the same thing. You are throwing good money after a dead thing. Let it go.

Here is the only reason I did not.

Before I started, I made myself a deal. Six months of full effort, no matter what the numbers did in the middle of it. I knew it would go up and down. I knew there would be weeks that looked like failure. And I decided I was not allowed to judge it, or quit it, until the six months were up. If it was still sliding down, down, down at the end, fine. I would walk away with my head high and no shame. But not a day before.

That one deal is the entire reason there is a graph to show you at all.

And I knew to make it because I had done this once before, with my own body. Losing fifty-five kilos and dragging my health back from two years in a wheelchair, the chart looked exactly like this one. Up. Down. A plateau so long and so flat I wanted to scream. Then, with no warning, movement again. Progress almost never travels in a straight line. It goes up, down, sideways, and then, if you refuse to quit in the flat bit, up.

Most people quit in the flat bit. That is the whole secret, and it is barely a secret. People stop in the exact stretch where it looks like nothing is working, which is almost always the stretch right before it does.

What I did, week by week

People keep asking what the magic was. I want to give them one clever answer, a secret, a single button to press. There is not one. There was a list, and I worked the list, week after grim week, until the line above started to move. So here is the honest how. No silver bullet. Just the order I did it in.

• Week 1, I cut. I de-indexed 1,300 pages on purpose. Thirteen hundred thin, dead, dated posts, pulled out of Google by choice. It felt like setting fire to part of my own house to stop the rot spreading. The traffic dropped. Of course it did. That is the long dip on the graph, the bit where I lay awake wondering what on earth I had done.
• Then the boring plumbing. Broken links, redirect chains, missing tags, the unglamorous technical work nobody screenshots. It is the equivalent of fixing the wiring before you repaint. Nobody claps for it. It matters more than most of the things people do clap for.
• Week 4, the audit. I went through the whole library and worked out, page by page, what was worth keeping and what was landfill. You cannot fix what you refuse to look at honestly.
• Week 11, the rescue. Then I dug 786 of the better pages back out of the bin and fought to get them re-indexed, one by one, like talking my way back into a club that had stopped letting me in.
• Then the wiring and the knocking. Internal links, so no decent page sits stranded with no way in. Then submitting the survivors to Google, again and again, because indexing is a queue and the only way through it is to keep knocking.
• Week 8, a fresh pair of eyes. I let the whole site get audited in 20 minutes and tell me the things I did not want to hear. (I went and did my hair while it ran, which felt like the most decadent thing I had done in months.)

Not one of those moves is clever on its own. Put them in order, repeat for thirteen weeks, and you get that line. That is the part the gurus leave out. There is no single move. There are a hundred small right moves, done in the right order, while everyone else sits waiting for a magic word that is never coming.

And the rankings followed the work. Here is my average position over the same stretch, dragging itself up out of the basement.

The numbers, worst to best

So let me lay the whole journey out, lowest to highest, no spin. This is what a rebuild looks like when you stop airbrushing it.

At the very bottom, one week this spring, my whole website was seen just 22,054 times. Twenty-two thousand. For a site this size, that is barely a pulse. My worst 30-day stretch crawled in at 113,115. And then it turned. My best 30 days have now crossed 506,086. Over half a million. Four and a half times the floor, and the biggest month this website has ever had. (Yes, ever. I have had it a very long time.)

And before you decide one fat month is a fluke, the steadier number says otherwise. Impressions are up 80% in the last 28 days against the 28 before. My average position has climbed from 30 in January to 16 now. Page two is not where I want to live. But page two, climbing, on a site I had quietly buried in the spring? I will take that and say thank you.

What good really looks like

Let me put those numbers in context, because a big number with no benchmark is just a flex, and flexing is dull. A rebuild in public should show the context, not only the trophy number. Here is how to read figures like mine, including your own.

Average position 16 means I am sitting at the top of page two. Here is why that matters and why I am not popping anything open yet. The top three results on page one take the lion's share of the visits. Almost nobody scrolls to page two on purpose. So position 16 is not the finish line. It is base camp with a clear view of the mountain. Under 10 is the first target worth chasing, and I am chasing it.

Impressions are not visits. An impression only means I showed up in someone's search. Half a million of them is lovely, but impressions do not pay a hosting bill. They are the leading signal, not the prize. They move first. The visits, and the income, follow if you keep going. So when you check your own numbers, watch impressions for the early sign and judge yourself on the trend, not one good day.

And growth like this, on an old site, is rare. Most large, ageing websites do not bounce. They fade. Quietly, page by page, until somebody turns the hosting off for good. The bit I am proud of is not the number. It is the turn.

The honest part nobody screenshots

Here is the number I almost left out. The one that does not fit on a celebration graphic.

I have roughly 2,900 posts. Google has indexed about 24% of them.

Read that again. Three quarters of my pages are not in the index at all. Not ranking badly. Not in. A page Google has not indexed cannot rank, cannot be found, and cannot earn a thing. It may as well be a document sat on my laptop.

So all of that growth, the 506,086, came from a quarter of my own site. Which is either terrifying or thrilling depending on the hour. Terrifying because three quarters of my work is invisible. Thrilling because, well, imagine the number when it is not. So that 24% is not a footnote. It is my next obsession, the single biggest challenge in front of me now. And here is my promise. I am going to come back in three months and put these numbers in front of you again, indexing and all, to show you whether I cracked it or whether it cracked me. Same graphs. Same honesty. I will not quietly drop the bad one if it refuses to move.

A few things I would tell you if you are doing this too

Thirteen weeks into this rebuild in public, I will not pretend there is one magic button. There is not. But here are a few things I would have paid good money to be told at the start, and they cost you nothing.

• Check what is really indexed before anything else. Most people pour weeks into ranking pages Google has not even let through the door. Find that out first. It changes what you do next.
• Prune before you publish. A pile of dead, thin, ancient pages drags the good ones down with it. Sometimes the fastest way up is to delete.
• Watch impressions, not just visits. Impressions move first. They are the tremor before the traffic. If they are climbing, hold on.
• A rebuild gets worse before it gets better. Mine did. The people who quit, quit in the dip. The dip is not failure. It is the toll you pay on the way up.
• Your most boring page might be your best one. My single biggest page is an old, unglamorous free list I made years ago. Not the clever stuff. The useful stuff.

What the numbers have started to change

None of this is a chart for the sake of a chart.

When you have watched your income disappear, a number going back up is not vanity. It is oxygen. The inquiries have started coming back. People are landing on the site, reading, and getting in touch again, after a long quiet stretch where the phone may as well have been unplugged. And the income, the thing that vanished, is finally creeping the right way up. That is the quiet win of this whole rebuild in public, the one that pays the mortgage.

I will be honest about the size of it, because I go on about honesty and then I have to live it. It is nowhere near what it was. Not close. Some months still make me wince. But it is up, for the first time in longer than I want to admit, and after the few years I have had, I am letting myself feel quietly, cautiously proud.

That is the part I was not sure I would ever get to write.

Rebuild in public, your quick questions

Can you really grow search traffic this fast?

Yes, and this whole rebuild in public is the proof. My best 30-day stretch went from a worst of 113,115 to 506,086, and my average position climbed from 27 in January to 16.0. The honest limit is that only about 24% of my pages are indexed, so the growth is real but there is plenty still locked away.

How long did it take to see results?

About three months, and it got worse before it got better. The numbers fell all through the spring, bottomed out in April, then climbed hard from May. A rebuild costs you before it pays you. If you bail in the dip, you never see the turn.

What is a good Google position?

Positions one to three on page one take most of the visits. Page two, where I sit at 16.0, gets a sliver of that. Under 10 is the first real target, and the top three is the dream. So 16 and climbing is progress, not a victory lap.

What is the catch?

Indexing. I have roughly 2,900 posts and Google has accepted about a quarter of them. Until that number moves, three quarters of the site cannot help me at all. It is the thing I am working on next.

The final word

A while ago I lost almost everything this website had built. I sat in the wreckage of it, in a body that had stopped cooperating, in a country at war, doing sums that refused to add up, and I seriously wondered whether the kind thing to do was switch the whole site off and walk away.

I did not switch it off.

I ran an experiment instead. Then another. And now, a few months on, I have a site that has crossed half a million impressions in a month, an income crawling back from nothing, and a 24% problem I am going to solve in front of you.

I am not going to tell you it is fixed. It is not. And I am not going to tell you that you have got this, because I have always hated that line, and because some weeks you have not got this, you have simply got through it. But the line is pointing up for the first time in years. And up, after all of it, will do very nicely.

I post these numbers on LinkedIn and Instagram during the week too, if you want them between posts. I will be back here next week with the next set. Some will be up. Some will not. I will show you both. That is the whole point of doing this where you can see me.

Where to go next

Every week I send a newsletter to a list of business owners, marketers and entrepreneurs. It is where these numbers land first, with a bit more behind them, before they ever make it to the blog. Sign up here. One email a week, no filler.

And if your own website has gone quiet and you want it brought back to life, the kind of rebuild in public I am doing here is exactly the work I do for a handful of business owners. Here is how to work with me.

Related reading: How I Use AI to Write Briefs That Get Good Work Back (From Freelancers, VAs, and Other AI Tools) and How to Build an AI Content Approval System That Protects Your Brand (Not Just Your Tone of Voice).

The week after this one, the rebuild paid off in a way I did not see coming: a stranger booked a call because Claude recommended me by name. Here is how I got found by AI.

Bottom line: Crossing half a million monthly visitors didn't happen from one viral post, it came from consistent public rebuilding, sharing the failures alongside the wins, and doubling down on the content formats that showed early traction. The numbers tell a clear story: audience trust compounds faster when you're transparent about the process, not just the results.

Frequently asked questions

What caused the traffic jump to half a million visitors?

A mix of consistent publishing, repurposing top-performing content across formats, and building in public so people followed the journey and kept coming back. No single tactic did it, the compounding effect of showing up did.

How long did it take to reach this milestone?

The rebuild took several months of steady effort before traffic really accelerated. Early months looked flat, then growth became exponential once a few key pieces of content started ranking and getting shared.

What role did building in public play in the growth?

Sharing real numbers, mistakes, and lessons created accountability and made the audience feel invested in the outcome. People shared the posts partly because they wanted to see what happened next.

Can this approach work for smaller sites or newer blogs?

Yes, the principles scale down. Being transparent about your numbers and process builds trust regardless of your starting traffic level, and it often accelerates growth because readers become part of the story.