Game Scout: How I Got from 30 Clicks to 250 (After Quitting in the Middle)

I Got Excited Again: 150 Clicks (Then 250)

I got pretty pumped up when I saw I had 150 clicks per month. It is nice to see people actually using what I built, and it felt somehow useful. This is the same feeling I had at the start, when I got my first 5 click achievement mail from Google. It motivated me a lot back then, and after seeing the changes I worked more on it, and I actually got the 250 click achievement just ten days later.

I Worked Around January and It Stalled at 30

I worked a lot around January and I thought I had made some nice improvements, added a lot. I did get more impressions, and clicks moved from 30 to 60, but the position went terrible, and over time the clicks declined back to 30.

Google Search Console, monthly Dec 2025: 30 clicks, 2,268 impressions, position 12.5 Jan 2026: 63 clicks, 6,606 impressions, position 31.1

So I Quit for Two Whole Months

When I saw it was not moving at all, it felt like I had worked for nothing. It demotivated me a lot and I stopped doing anything for months. I tried a few different projects instead, worked on them for a few months, but they did not move much either.

I am not exaggerating about the break. The commit history of the project shows it exactly. Nothing in February, nothing in March:

$ git log --date='format:%Y-%m' --pretty='%ad' | sort | uniq -c

  Dec 2025  ██████████████   28 commits
  Jan 2026  █████████        17 commits   ← last commit Jan 12
  Feb 2026  (nothing)         0 commits   ← I gave up here
  Mar 2026  (nothing)         0 commits
  Apr 2026  ████████████████ 31 commits   ← came back Apr 5
  May 2026  ███               7 commits
  Jun 2026  ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████  152 commits

Google Search Console, the gap months Feb 2026: 30 clicks, 3,146 impressions, position 20.2 Mar 2026: 33 clicks, 3,577 impressions, position 22.6

The Comeback: Fewer Pages, Better Pages

After spending time on those new projects, I realized something: my game database project already had real users and visitors. It should be easier to grow this project than to start a new one. So I tried to understand what I had done wrong. I started with the pages that were already working a little, and focused on improving the quality of the pages that already had some users.

Google Search Console, monthly Apr 2026: 44 clicks, 4,079 impressions, position 20.3 May 2026: 62 clicks, 9,461 impressions, position 21.4 Jun 2026: 262 clicks, 19,701 impressions, position 12.3

Top June pages by clicks best-medieval-fantasy-games: 85 clicks, position 7.6 best-medical-games: 54 clicks, position 5.9

This first pass was about content quality, not just SEO. I changed the auto-created lists to hand-curated ones, removed the outliers, and tried to have more real data about each game.

150 Lit the Fire and It Kept Going to 250

When I actually saw 150 clicks, I knew it was working, so I wanted to push more. This time I went after the second tier: pages sitting in position 15 to 20 that already had at least one click in the last 3 months. Those were the ones close to breaking through, so I rebuilt each with IGDB data, more reviews, a bigger sentiment-analysis data set, and a short reason for why each game is on the list. This moved things a lot, and now I get 250 clicks per month just from Google.

Google Search Console, January vs June Jan 2026: 63 clicks, 6,606 impressions, position 31.1 Jun 2026: 262 clicks, 19,701 impressions, position 12.3

What the Data Taught Me: The Work Is the Variable

So in the end, what I understand is this: it is okay to be stuck sometimes, but the important thing is to keep going. It is also always better to work with data. And it is always easier to improve something that already exists and build on top of it.

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