First time joining a monthly contest. Finished second-to-last, but at least I ran the full race.

1. The Results

The March new-keyword new-site contest results are in. 49 websites entered, and my site came in at #45.

March stats: 211 UV, 363 PV. Compared to the top entries pulling tens of thousands of UV, the gap is massive.

2. What I Built

I built a browser games site.

The reasoning was straightforward: this type of site has compounding value — content accumulates over time and isn’t dependent on a single keyword.

But the downside is obvious too: the niche I chose has relatively low search volume and isn’t a fresh keyword. The whole point of a new-keyword contest is low competition and fast growth potential — my choice of direction gave up that advantage from the start.

3. What I Did in March

Honestly, March was a pretty lazy month:

Only 8 pages indexed out of 66 published — that’s a low ratio, suggesting content quality or site authority wasn’t strong enough. The 22 backlinks were a start, but didn’t move the needle much.

4. What the Top 15 Looked Like

The top three sites pulled UV of 220K, 101K, and 77K respectively — all tool sites or game walkthrough sites. The gap is enormous.

First place was a tool site with 220K UV and ¥999 in prize money. Second place, also a tool site, had 100K UV. Third was a game walkthrough site with 77K UV. The top entries all chose niches with higher search volume and lower competition — better suited for a new site to ramp up quickly.

Sites similar to mine (general games sites) mostly landed outside the top 10. Games sites tend to have a lower traffic ceiling, though the real issue is keyword selection and content quality.

5. What Went Wrong

This contest exposed a few obvious problems:

1. Bad keyword choice. The whole point of new-keyword SEO contests is finding a high-volume, low-competition term. Mine had low volume to begin with — a structural disadvantage.

2. Content quality was too low. 66 pages published, only 8 indexed. That ratio means most of the content had little value to search engines.

3. Not enough effort overall. March was basically “I showed up.” No serious optimization, no iteration. The result reflects that.

6. April Plan

A low starting point is fine — there’s plenty of room to improve.

April goal: break into the top 30. I’ll focus on:

• Improving content quality, cutting low-value pages to boost indexing rate
• Building more targeted backlinks to improve domain authority
• Reviewing which inner pages are getting traffic and doubling down on those

First contest was about learning the rhythm. Onwards to April.