I built a free invoice generator — vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, zero backend, hosted free on Cloudflare Pages. Then I did the SEO basics properly: meta tags, JSON-LD, sitemap, Search Console verification.
Google crawled it the same day I submitted the sitemap. Within 48 hours, Search Console said "URL is on Google."
I thought that was the hard part. It wasn't.
The first 2 weeks, by the numbers:
- Impressions: 8
- Clicks: 0
- Average position: ~44
- One day (Oct 29) spiked to 6 impressions at position 10 — bottom of page 1 for something — then disappeared again.
What I learned:
1. Indexed ≠ ranked. Getting into Google's index is a technical checkbox. Getting onto page 1 for a query anyone actually types is a different game entirely — one decided by backlinks and authority, not meta tags.
2. The queries that found me weren't real queries. The only queries Google would even name were "site:pages.dev" variants — existence checks, not people looking for an invoice generator. The other 6 impressions came from queries too rare for Google to disclose.
3. The sitemap worked. The distribution didn't. The sitemap got Google to crawl within hours. But with only an X post and two dev.to articles pointing at it, there's no authority signal. Google has no reason to rank a 2-week-old page above competitors that have been accumulating links for years.
What I'm doing next: more backlinks that aren't mine — community posts, the tool earning links by being useful, and patience. No tricks, no keyword stuffing. Just the slow game.
The unglamorous truth: SEO for a new site is mostly waiting, and the waiting only pays off if something's pointing at you.
The tool, if you want to see what got indexed: https://free-invoicegen.pages.dev
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