A new Hindi news site, five weeks in: what actually earns the click

Impressions are the easiest number in SEO to feel good about. They are also the one most likely to be lying to you.

Five weeks ago I launched Vartalaap, a Hindi news and public-information site I run for Punjab. It covers the practical side of dealing with the state and the banks — ration cards, electricity connections, pension and scholarship schemes, PF claims, what the RBI actually allows a lender to charge you. No backlinks, no promotion, no paid traffic. I wanted to see what organic search alone would do with a brand-new domain in a Hindi niche.

The headline numbers after five weeks: around 8,700 impressions and 39 clicks, at an average position of about 8.4, with 97% of it on mobile.

Thirty-nine clicks is not a success story. But the distance between those two numbers turned out to be the most useful thing I have learned this year, and most of it applies well beyond one news site.

Not all impressions are worth the same

If you take one thing from this article, take this.

The single biggest page on the site was a guide to getting a new electricity connection from PSPCL, the Punjab power utility. It collected 1,566 impressions and exactly one click.

For weeks I treated it as the site’s biggest opportunity. It was the page I kept trying to improve. Then I looked at the individual queries:

• “pspcl new connection” — position 8.2, zero clicks
• “pspcl new connection online apply” — position 7.5, zero clicks
• “online complaint pspcl” — position 6.2, zero clicks
• “pspcl new connection status” — position 4.7, zero clicks

Position 4.7, and still nothing.

The reason is obvious once you see it. Someone typing “pspcl new connection online apply” is not looking for an article. They are looking for pspcl.in, and Google gives it to them at the top. Nobody scrolls past the official portal to read about the official portal. These are navigational searches wearing informational clothing, and no amount of optimisation will win them.

Compare a page about checking your name on the revised voter list. It collected 11 impressions and 4 clicks.

Eleven impressions beat fifteen hundred. The difference is not ranking or content quality. It is whether the answer the searcher wants is a website or a piece of information. If it is a website, you will lose to that website every time.

A useful test before you write anything: search the query yourself and ask whether a reasonable person would be satisfied by clicking the first result. If the first result is the official portal, move on.

On mobile, position 7 is a long way down

Across every page, the pattern was the same. Pages averaging position 3 to 5 got clicks — sometimes a lot of them relative to impressions. Pages averaging 8 and below got almost none, even with hundreds of impressions.

On a phone, position 8 sits below ads, below an AI overview, below a “People also ask” box and below several results. Most searchers never reach it. The drop is not gradual. There is something close to a cliff somewhere around position 6, and above it and below it are two different businesses.

This matters for how you judge progress. A page moving from position 12 to 8 looks like improvement in a report and changes almost nothing in reality. A page moving from 8 to 5 can change everything.

Your own pages compete with each other

I wrote a general page listing government offices in Ludhiana, which included the RTO. Later I wrote a dedicated, more complete page on the Ludhiana RTO alone.

The dedicated page got zero impressions for five days. Every RTO search kept going to the older general page, which had “RTO” in its title and had been indexed longer.

I removed “RTO” from the general page’s title and replaced its RTO section with a link to the dedicated page. Within a week the dedicated page went from zero to 625 impressions.

Nothing about the new page changed. Google simply stopped having an older, more established candidate for the same query. If you are publishing a more specific page on a topic you have already touched, check what your older pages are still claiming.

The Hindi web is full of stale facts — which is the opportunity

Researching each piece meant going to the official source rather than the top-ranking article. Again and again, the top-ranking articles were wrong — not maliciously, just out of date:

• A toll-plaza rule about free passage after a long queue, withdrawn years ago, still presented as current on major sites with 2026 dates on the page
• A retirement-fund activation method discontinued in 2025, still explained as the way to do it
• Demat account fee thresholds from 2019, long since revised upward
• Lookalike “official” websites for state welfare schemes that have no official portal at all

Much of the Hindi public-information web republishes older content with a new date on it. Few people check the source. That creates a very specific opening for a new site: not more content, but correct content where everyone else has copied the same mistake.

It is also the only real defence against the kind of low-value publishing that search updates keep targeting. If your article says the same thing as the ten above it, there is no reason for it to rank. If it says the thing they got wrong, there is.

What hasn’t worked yet

Being honest about this is the point of writing it up.

Average position has barely moved in three weeks. It has sat between 8 and 9 the whole time. I rewrote titles to match search intent, restructured the highest-traffic pages so the answer appears on the first screen instead of after an introduction, and added internal links between related pages. None of it has visibly shifted the average yet.

Publishing faster did not help either. When I pushed volume up, a growing share of new pages sat in “Discovered — currently not indexed” for days. On a new domain, Google crawls at its own pace. Publishing faster than it crawls just lengthens the queue.

The site has no backlinks at all, and for a five-week-old domain that is almost certainly the ceiling. On-page work gets you to page one. It does not get a new site to the top three.

What I would tell a client from this

1. Look at clicks per query, not impressions per page. A page with a big impression count can be almost worthless if its queries are navigational
2. Before writing, check who owns the first result. If it is the official site for the thing being searched, pick a different question
3. Put the answer on the first screen. Nobody on mobile reads three paragraphs of context to find a phone number
4. Audit your older pages when you publish a more specific one. They may be quietly holding the query
5. Go to the primary source. In most Indian niches, being correct is still a competitive advantage
6. Expect on-page work to plateau. After a point, position on a new domain moves on links and time, not on more rewriting

None of this is new in principle. What surprised me was how large the effects were in practice — a single page with fifteen hundred impressions producing one click, and a single title change taking another page from nothing to six hundred impressions in a week.

I will write this up again once the site has some links behind it, and we can see what actually moves the average.

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I’m Nikhil Kalia, an SEO consultant and web developer based in Jalandhar, working since 2009 with clients in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Germany. I work with businesses across Jalandhar and Punjab on search and websites.

If your site has plenty of impressions and very few clicks, the answer is usually in the query data. Send it over and I’ll take a look. No charge — get in touch.