No traffic after three months: what to check before giving up
You have done the work for a quarter and the chart is still flat. You need to know whether to persist or stop.
Separate "not indexed" from "not ranking"
These look identical on a traffic chart and share no remedies. Check coverage first. Zero impressions means an indexing or demand problem. Impressions without clicks means you are ranking, badly, which is progress.
Check that demand exists at all
The most common cause of genuine zero is targeting phrases nobody types. If you invented the query, no amount of patience will help. Verify in autocomplete and forums, which takes an afternoon and should have happened first.
Then, if both check out, the answer is usually to continue
Results settle on a one-to-four month lag. A quarter of work is a quarter of results not yet visible. This is genuinely difficult advice to follow and it is also correct more often than not.
Three months is not a verdict, but it is a diagnostic
Zero clicks at three months is normal. Zero impressions at three months is not. If Search Console shows impressions climbing, the machine is working and you are early. If it shows a flat line near zero, something is broken upstream: not indexed, not crawlable, or aimed at queries that do not exist. Those are three different problems and only the first is about waiting.
The uncomfortable question
Is there anyone searching for this? Plenty of sites are executing well against demand that is not there. Take your five best pages, find the exact query each one is for, and confirm in your own Search Console impressions that anyone has ever searched it. If nothing has impressions after 90 days, the problem is the topic, and no amount of technical work fixes a topic.
Measured, not asserted
At the end of month three this site had produced 1,508 clicks in total. By month eight it was producing 16,410 a month. The work that caused month eight was already done and simply not visible yet.
Free tool for this: SERP Audit. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 14 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.