What Google sent a brand-new directory in its first 90 days

The Lingerie Shoppe is a directory of 110 independent Canadian lingerie and bra-fitting shops, in 65 cities across all 10 provinces. It’s for people who need a bra that fits: after a mastectomy, through pregnancy and nursing, or in sizes the chains don’t carry.

We built it on a domain with no history and no authority. Part of the reason was to find out what a new site can earn from Google on its own. We now have three months of Search Console data, so here’s what came in.

The challenge

A directory on a new domain starts at zero. No links pointing in, no track record, no reason for Google to trust it.

This one also covers a subject where getting it wrong matters. Someone looking for fitting after surgery needs the shop to exist, and needs it to do what we say it does. So the question wasn’t only “will it rank”. It was whether a new site can earn trust on a sensitive subject without buying it.

The choices

Curated, not scraped. The editors pick every shop. There’s no paid placement, chains are left out, and we don’t pull in reviews from other sites. That keeps the listing count modest. It also means every listing is there for a reason.

Two full languages, not a translate button. The directory has 694 pages: 347 in English and 347 in French. Each pair is tagged so Google knows which page is the English version and which is the French. A French shop page is marked as Canadian French, not as an English page with French words on it. This doubled the page count and the work. We did it because a national directory that treats Quebec as an afterthought isn’t national.

Written for the person being fitted. The copy talks about comfort, fit, health and body autonomy. It doesn’t talk to gift buyers.

Readable by machines as well as people. Every boutique, service and brand is also published as a linked data file that AI tools can read without guessing at the page layout.

What came in

From July 1 to September 29, 2026, Google showed the site’s pages 45,600 times. People clicked 481 times. Average position was 21.7, which is mostly page three. Click-through rate was 1.1%.

That’s a modest number of clicks. The impressions interest us more: 474 different pages showed up in results. Google is testing most of the site, not just the home page.

What earned the clicks:

• A guide, not a listing. The top page by clicks is an article on breast prosthesis funding by province: 17 clicks from 788 impressions.
• City and province pages. Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan all made the top ten.
• The French pages. The French Montreal page drew 2,517 impressions, about three times the English Montreal page’s 821. The French Quebec page drew 1,354. Bilingual paid off where we hoped it would.
• Service pages. Bra fitting earned 16 clicks from 915 impressions. Post-mastectomy earned 12 from 830.

The searches fall into two groups. Broad ones like “lingerie stores” (362 impressions, 1 click) and “bra stores near me” (115 impressions, 1 click), where we show up but not high enough to get picked. And searches for one shop by name, often with a town or “hours” attached. Those people want a single store’s details, and a directory page is a reasonable answer.

Someone also typed our name with an extra “e” and found us anyway.

What we don’t know yet

We don’t know whether any of those 481 clicks turned into a visit to a shop. The site doesn’t take bookings, and we have no count of leads.

We also don’t know how much of the 21.7 average is the domain being new and how much is the pages themselves. Three months isn’t long enough to separate the two.

What we’d change

Every boutique page in the sitemap carries the same date, July 2, 2026. That’s when the pages were built, not when each shop was last checked. For a directory, freshness is the product. A visible “last checked” date on each listing is next, and the sitemap dates should follow real checks, not the build.

What it means for your site

Two things carry over to an ordinary business site.

First, the pages that answered one specific question earned clicks before the general pages did: who funds a prosthesis in my province, where can I get fitted in my city. Write the page your customer would search for, not the page about you.

Second, if you serve customers in two languages, a proper second version isn’t a courtesy. On this site, it’s where a good share of the visibility came from.

You can see this site next to our other builds on the examples page, and how we put them together on how it works.