We began tracking rankings back in November 2021. Out of 3,291 tracked keywords, only 5 sat in TOP-1 and 66 in TOP-10. Most of the rest either never showed up in search results or sat somewhere past position 100.
The niche is crowded. Spa, manicure, and solarium searches in Kyiv are contested by chain salons with ad budgets and by a long list of independent stylists running their own pages. The site already had some SEO history behind it, but Google simply wasn't seeing a large chunk of the beauty-related queries.
The work ran across several tracks, and some of them are still running every month.
The ongoing technical side:
Picking and structuring the services:
Blog posts went out on a regular schedule: picking topics tied to real queries, translating, editing, sourcing images, publishing. Not filler, each post was built around a specific search query.
As of July 28, 2026, 286 out of 3,557 tracked keywords sit in TOP-1, that's 8%. TOP-10 is at 45.5%, up from 2%. The biggest jump came in the middle tiers: TOP-3 climbed from 0.3% to 18%, TOP-30 from 6.4% to 60%.
We also added a Ukrainian-language branch of the semantic core: 3,312 keywords under tracking, already catching up to the Russian-language one, with 93 keywords in TOP-1 within the first few months.
Monthly traffic swings more than rankings do, because a solarium and much of the spa menu are seasonal: people tan outdoors in summer and book the salon in winter. A few Google core updates over the past year added their own noise on top. The number worth watching isn't any single month, it's the steady rise in the share of keywords sitting in the top.
The domain and the site started from zero. We first built it on WordPress, the cheapest option to get moving. Later it became clear the site needed faster load times and simpler navigation and content editing, so we moved it onto the Laravel framework. When we pulled the first ranking reports from November 2021, the picture was weak. 5 keywords in TOP-1 out of nearly three and a half thousand tracked. Everything else was scattered somewhere between position 30 and 100, or further out still.
| Position | Then (11.2021) | Now (07.2026) |
|---|---|---|
| TOP-1 | 0.15% | 8.04% |
| TOP-3 | 0.30% | 18.22% |
| TOP-5 | 0.97% | 29.01% |
| TOP-10 | 2.01% | 45.52% |
| TOP-30 | 6.38% | 60.44% |
| TOP-100 | 65.76% | 66.43% |
| Beyond TOP-100 | 34.24% | 33.57% |
TOP-100 and "beyond TOP-100" barely moved, and that's worth saying plainly: most keywords were technically indexed by Google from the start, just buried deep. The real work went into pulling them toward page one, and that shows in the 15 to 20 times gain across the top positions.
| Search query | Frequency | Starting position | Current position |
|---|---|---|---|
| spa | 14,800 | >100 | 10 |
| solarium | 12,100 | >100 | 2 |
| Thai massage | 3,600 | >100 | 13 |
| spa salon | 1,600 | >100 | 5 |
| hair braiding for kids | 720 | >100 | 6 |
| spa center | 610 | >100 | 4 |
| manicure salon in Kyiv | 140 | >100 | 12 |
| manicure price | 90 | >100 | 10 |
| eyelash extensions price in Kyiv | 70 | >100 | 9 |
| how much a manicure costs in Kyiv | 40 | >100 | 11 |
The solarium page got more attention than most others: we rewrote the page copy several times, adjusted headings and structure, updated internal linking, and worked through the different spellings people search for. Some of the work happened off the page too, gradually building and cleaning up the backlink profile. The result here is not from one fix, it is the sum of small changes over a long stretch of time.
Traffic over the past year has ranged roughly between 1,000 and 1,600 clicks and 130,000 to 200,000 impressions a month. That's not a straight line up, and we're not going to present it as one: the solarium is seasonal, competing with actual sunshine in summer and winning clients back in winter. A handful of Google core updates over the year added noise across the board, not just on this site. The number that matters here isn't any given month, it's the steady quarter-over-quarter climb in the share of keywords sitting in the top.
A separate push in 2026 went into the Ukrainian-language side of the site: a new branch of the semantic core with 3,312 keywords, already closing in on the Russian-language one, with 93 keywords in TOP-1 within the first few months of tracking.
By summer 2026, the regular workload picked up something that wasn't part of anyone's process a year before: indexing for AI search. An llms.txt file, a robots.txt reworked for AI crawlers, and checks on whether Claude, GPT, Grok, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Google AI Overview actually surface the site. Chances are this becomes as routine as a Search Console check soon enough.
