SEQ-16: from zero to 100 Google Search clicks a day, with no ad budget
SEQ-16 at drum-machine.app is a free browser drum machine with samples from 470 vintage drum machines. I designed, built and grew it alone. This report covers its first eleven months in Google Search.
Summary
Every click below came from unpaid Google Search. The site started with no domain history, no backlinks and no audience.
Zero paid, social or press promotion
- No advertising spend of any kind.
- No social media campaigns and no influencer posts.
- No press coverage or paid placements.
- A few short demo videos went on YouTube in late October 2026, near the end of this period. Search Console counts Google Search clicks only, so they are not part of these numbers.
The growth came without paid, social or press promotion. The work behind it was site architecture, technical SEO and content.
Growth over eleven months
Weekly clicks from Google Search. Hover or tap the chart for each week's numbers.
Clicks per week
Full weeks starting Monday, 1 Dec 2025 to 26 Oct 2026. The last three days of the period (1 to 3 Nov) are in the monthly table.- Steady climb from a standing start. Monthly clicks went from 11 in December to 73 in January, 677 in April and 2,359 in June.
- A summer dip, then a full recovery. Average ranking position slipped to 17.8 in August and clicks fell to 1,516 in September. October came back to 2,392 clicks, a new record, at an average position of 9.6.
- Still rising. The week of 26 October was the best on record with 775 clicks, and 2 November was the best single day with 132.
| Month | Clicks | Impressions | CTR | Avg. position |
|---|
What drove it: a long-tail page architecture
Instead of betting everything on the homepage, I built a dedicated, crawlable page for each machine, plus a searchable sample library, and published them in 20 languages. Most traffic now comes from these pages.
Clicks by page type
Top 1,000 pages, 12,679 clicks*- 73% of clicks land on machine pages, not the homepage. If one keyword slips, hundreds of other pages keep bringing visitors in.
- Machine pages earn far more clicks per impression. Play pages average a 16.7% click-through rate and sample-library pages 9.6%, against 4.4% for the English homepage, because each page answers one specific search.
- The homepage still competes for the head terms. "drum machine online" earned 14,734 impressions at an average position of 8.9, and "online drum machine" another 10,103.
- Translations add reach. Pages in other languages earned 657 clicks from 247 URLs.
Top pages
By clicks, full period| Page | Clicks | Impressions | CTR | Position |
|---|
What people searched for
Two kinds of intent bring visitors: people who want to play a drum machine in the browser, and people looking for the sounds of a specific classic machine.
| Search query | Clicks | Impressions | CTR | Position |
|---|
- Specific machine searches rank near the top. "linndrum online" (position 3.6), "monomachine online" (1.1) and "roland tr 909 online" (4.0) win more than a third of their searchers.
- Sample searches are a second audience. Queries like "linn 9000 samples" and "oberheim dmx samples" bring in producers looking for sounds.
Reach and devices
A niche music tool with a genuinely international audience.
Top countries
Clicks, full periodDevices
Clicks and click-through rateMobile searchers click through more often (9.8%) than desktop searchers (6.7%), so the app was built to hold up on phones.
Visibility in Google's AI features
Google's Search Console reports when pages appear in its AI-generated results. SEQ-16 pages started appearing there in May 2026 and reached 7,600 impressions, more than half of them in October. These are impressions only, not visits.
Impressions in Google AI features per week
First recorded 18 May 2026The skills behind these numbers
Technical SEO
Server-side rendered pages, hreflang across 20 languages, clean crawlable URLs and a machine index page that links the whole catalog.
Programmatic content at scale
Hundreds of useful pages generated from a structured catalog of 470 machines, each written to answer one real search.
Search and AI visibility
Pages structured for both ranking and AI answers, including an llms.txt file that describes the product for AI crawlers.
Measurement
Search Console analysis plus self-hosted Umami analytics with custom events, used to find where visitors get stuck and fix it.
Product and UX
Onboarding hints, clearer labels and mobile stability, tested against real visitor behavior and user feedback.
Fast, lean execution
Built and run by one person with AI coding tools, on a small VPS, with no budget beyond hosting.
About the data
All figures are from Google Search Console exports for drum-machine.app, search type Web. The site's first recorded impression was on 5 Dec 2025, so the report covers about eleven months. Weekly charts end with the last full week, starting 26 Oct 2026.
*Page-level figures come from the Pages export, which Google totals by URL. That is why the page-type total (12,679) is slightly higher than the site total (12,618). Page figures cover the top 1,000 URLs in the export.
Google hides many individual queries for privacy, so the query table shows the most-clicked visible queries only. The AI features report counts impressions only. Clicks from other search engines, AI chat assistants and direct visits are not included, so total traffic is higher than shown here.