Where things actually stand.

Joachim asked a fair question after our call: if the links are working, why does search traffic look flat year on year, and why is so much of the growth branded or from the new car seat towels range? Rather than defend our position we went and checked properly.

Everything below comes from your Google Search Console and your Shopify, not from estimates. Some of it is uncomfortable reading for us. Some of it points at a real opportunity that has been sitting in front of us the whole time.

They are not doing much.

Since November we have built 273 links across 211 domains. Most of them sit on free publishing and bookmarking platforms, places like Medium, Notion, Diigo, Tumblr and Blogger, where anyone can create a page. The platform itself has a high domain rating, so on a report the link looks strong. The individual page carries very little weight.

We first checked those platforms against Ahrefs and none of them registered. Ahrefs is not Google though, so on its own that proves little. So we went to the source that does count: the linking domains report inside your own Search Console, which is Google telling you directly which sites it credits as linking to you.

Google credits your site with 134 external links from 47 domains. We took our own link building log, every one of the 273 links across all eight months, and checked all 211 source domains against that list one by one. Nine of them appear, accounting for 19 of the 134 links.

So of 273 links built over eight months, Google credits 19. Roughly four in every hundred domains we used registered at all. The rest of your link profile was there already or arrived on its own.

What this actually tells us about link building in 2026

It is worth being precise about what the 134 links are. They are every link Google credits to your site from every source since it existed, not our work. Most of them nobody built on purpose. They split roughly like this:

Splitting our own log by the type of link makes the point sharper. The twenty business listings we set up in November, the foundational directory work, registered at roughly four times the rate of everything else we built:

The wider point stands though. Directory and profile listings still register with Google, so foundational links remain worth doing, and they are a one-off job rather than a monthly one. The free-platform links that made up the bulk of our monthly work have stopped counting for anything. Our own team's outreach backs this up: around 100 approaches to relevant blogs for editorial placements returned zero free placements, and almost every one asked for payment. So the realistic options now are foundational links once, genuine PR and relationships, or paid placements. There is no longer a meaningful free middle.

That is a change in the market rather than something unique to your site, but we should have caught it sooner and told you rather than carrying on with the old approach.

To be fair to the data: Google's report is not a complete map of the web either, and we cannot prove with certainty these links did nothing at all. What we can say is that neither Google nor any tool we have shows them, and there is no pattern in your numbers that suggests they moved anything.

The site is in a much better position than it was.

Comparing April to July this year against the same months last year, with brand and car seat towels removed, here is where your search visibility actually sits:

Your total impressions are down about 40% over that period, and on its own that looks alarming. It is not. Almost all of the drop sits at positions 21 and beyond, which between them produced 37 clicks in the whole of last year. You have stopped being shown on page four for things that were never going to sell a towel, and started being shown on page one for things that will.

Your Shopify agrees at the money end: organic revenue is up 28.9% since kickoff, $30,075 to $38,755, and organic is still your biggest channel by revenue. Those two dollar figures are Shopify's own, for the April to July window. The monthly tabs on this page quote GA4 instead, which counts a narrower slice of the same sales, so the two sets of revenue figures will not line up and are not meant to.

Traffic held flat for nine months, then September moved.

On the like-for-like months behind this audit, total clicks were up 8%, from 2,157 to 2,330. So traffic was not down. But we checked Joachim's other point properly, and he was right about that too. Of the 173 extra clicks, roughly 104 were car seat towels and 40 were branded. About 83% of that growth was your new range and your brand, with everything else contributing around 29 clicks. On clicks alone, the nine months to July 2026 moved very little, and it was fair of him to say so.

September is the month that balance flipped, and it flipped the right way. The homepage lost 46 clicks while the four collection pages on the month's top-ten list gained 97 between them, going from 155 clicks to 252. Read that as a direction rather than a measurement, because the data behind it does not split brand-name searches from the rest: the homepage is usually where people typing your name land, and the collection pages are where people describing the thing they want land. On that read, September's growth came from people describing a towel rather than people who already knew you, which is what this whole plan is for.

What the click count hides is the table in section 02. Underneath that flat number the site has moved out of the positions where nothing happens and into the ones where it does. The work built the position. It has not been converted into clicks, and the next two sections explain exactly why.

Google cannot decide which of your pages to show.

This is the finding that explains most of the rest.

You have the same collection at two different addresses

There is a beach towels collection and a travel towels collection. All 22 products on the beach towels page also sit on the travel towels page. They are the same range, listed twice, under two different titles.

Look at the beach towels collection. That page has close to the perfect title for the searches you most want to win, and Google has never once shown it in search results, across the entire sixteen months of data available. All 22 of its products also sit on the travel towels page.

We checked directly with Google rather than assume. The page is indexed, Google treats it as a legitimate page in its own right rather than folding it into another, and it was crawled again on 5 August. It has simply never been chosen as the best answer to any search.

Once we started looking, it was not just those two. We crawled every product collection on the store and compared them against each other. Five of your fourteen collections are fully duplicated inside another one:

Google is reluctant to rank pages it sees as duplicates, so when it meets several versions of the same range it tends to trust none of them and shows something else instead. That is what the next table shows happening.

A sixth, Microfibre Towels, sits just outside that list: it also has no products of its own, but they are spread across three collections rather than sitting inside one. We initially read it as a deliberate material-based grouping and asked; Anna confirmed on 19 August that it was set up for SEO purposes like the others, so it is included in the consolidation plan.

That is exactly what the next table shows. With no collection winning the search, Google falls back on whatever else it can find:

A tea towel page is being shown to people searching for quick dry towels. So is a beach mat page. None of them gets clicked, because none of them is what the searcher asked for.

The same thing happens on your hooded towel range, where a single product page keeps beating the collection that was built for the job:

The collection ranks four to ten places better whenever Google picks it. It just does not pick it often enough.

You are being shown far more than you are being clicked.

Every non-branded search on your site in the twelve months to July 2026, grouped by the position Google's own data recorded:

A 2.24% click rate at positions four to ten is roughly a third of what those positions normally return. The reason is section 04, and you can see it directly by comparing a range where one page clearly owns the search against one where five pages compete:

Your quick dry family alone was shown over 20,000 times across that year at positions 8 to 10 and returned under 200 clicks. At the car seat towels click rate that same visibility would return around 1,100.

The page two pool, priced on your own numbers.

1,433 of your non-branded searches sat at positions 11 to 20 across the twelve months to July 2026. They were shown 115,384 times in that year and returned 658 clicks. In September each organic visit was worth A$3.51, which is the A$3,336.64 GA4 tracked from organic search over 951 organic visits, so:

Hold the dollar column loosely. The value of a visit swings month to month, A$1.50 in August against A$3.51 in September, so at August's rate those same two gains price at roughly $2,880 and $7,110. Search Console counts clicks and GA4 counts visits, so the two will never reconcile exactly either. Read it as the size of the prize rather than a forecast.

Where it was concentrated across that year, and none of it needs a new link:

Those are full-year counts, so read them as the size of each pool rather than today's run rate. The hooded towels collection averaged about 2,310 appearances a month across that window and was shown 1,577 times in September.

The way we set this up was too rigid.

We want to be straight about the root of this, because it is more useful than a list of fixes.

At the start we agreed a scope of thirty keywords and the thirty landing pages that matched them. Those pages were optimised well. Then Google did what Google does and started ranking different pages instead: the homepage, the beach mats collection, a tea towel page, individual products.

The deeper issue is that the engagement was built as a fixed list to work through rather than something we re-read every month. A search programme should look at what Google actually did in the last thirty days and respond to it. If Google decides your tea towel page answers "quick dry towels australia", the job that month is to fix that, not to carry on optimising a page Google has stopped showing.

So the change we would make, on your account and generally, is this:

• Monthly, we read what actually happened. Which pages Google chose, which searches moved, where clicks are being lost, and what changed on the results page itself.
• The work for that month follows from that, rather than from a list agreed at the start. Some months that is on-page, some months content, some months technical.
• The keyword list is a direction, not a contract. If Google keeps ranking a page we did not target, we either make that page good or we make the intended page clearly better. We do not ignore it.
• Reporting shows revenue and the pages driving it, with the reasoning, rather than a list of links built.

Worth tidying up. Not what is holding you back.

On the disavow

A disavow file is in place and was refreshed on 30 July. It currently covers 43 domains. Our audit turned up 321 spam domains in total, so we have handed the fuller list across and it can be merged into the existing file whenever you want it done.

What is done, what is running, what is next.

This page is the standing picture of the engagement. The monthly tabs carry the numbers; this is the shape of the work behind them.

• The on-page work in sections 04, 05 and 06 is done. Owner pages decided for each search, internal links pointed at them, and the titles and headings rewritten on the pages Google was actually choosing to show. The September tab is where that turns up: six of the nine terms sitting on page one in the 12 October check are quick dry or travel towel searches, which is the cluster that work was aimed at.
• Monthly volume link building stays retired, for the reasons in section 01. Authority has held through it: in the 12 October pull Ahrefs reads Domain Rating 19, from 1,016 links across 749 referring domains.
• The collection consolidation is the next structural fix. It is what the hooded towel searches are waiting on, and the merge-by-merge plan, including every internal link that moves, sits on the consolidation tab.
• Mobile speed sits with Gil directly. Your site was loading in 14 to 17 seconds on mobile at the audit, against a 2.5 second target, and that holds back everything else in this document. He works on it with you directly rather than through us.
• Content production runs through Notable, our own AI search platform. The brand kit work you have been doing is the calibration step that makes what it produces sound like Will & Wind rather than generic towel copy. A walkthrough of the dashboard and its AI visibility tracking is the next thing to get in the diary.
• Everything we have built is yours. The backlink audit, the disavow file, the keyword research, the AI prompt library, the cluster strategy and the page-by-page fix list. All documented, and all reachable from the tabs at the top of this page.

The short version.

Where it stands in one line: the on-page work is done and starting to show, the collection consolidation is the next structural fix, monthly volume link building stays retired, and site speed sits with Gil.

That on-page work came with a prediction: movement on the quick dry and hooded towel searches inside four to eight weeks. The quick dry half landed. On the live Google Australia check on 12 October, six of the nine terms sitting on page one are quick dry or travel towel searches, and one of them is at number one. The hooded half did not. Fourteen of the thirty terms we track returned nothing at all on the day of that check, and nine of those fourteen are hooded towel searches. Those are the exact pages the collection consolidation is built to fix, which is why it is the next job rather than a nice-to-have.

Happy to talk through any of it. Every figure here traces back to your own Search Console, your own GA4 or your own Shopify, and we will show you the working behind any number you want to check.