In September 2026, a founder posted on r/SaaS that Google was not ranking their new site even though they had done the "basic SEO" work: meta titles, descriptions, indexing. Search Console showed 159
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Charlie from xSquads
The step that moves the needle for a brand-new site is step 4, so I'd make it a hard filter rather than a judgment call. Here's a quick way to run it in your sheet: for each candidate keyword, open the top 10 results and add three columns: how many are big brands, how many are single-topic pages written for that exact question, and whether any are forums or small blogs. If forums or small blogs show up in the top 10, mark it a green keyword. If it's all big brands, park it.
Then a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT or Claude: "Here are 40 phrases my customers use to describe their problem [paste]. Group them by intent (learn, compare, buy), and for each group suggest one page title that answers the question in plain words." Check its groups against the real results page before writing anything. Re-check Search Console after four weeks and rewrite the pages that have impressions but no clicks.