The Problem

While researching construction material prices, I kept running into the same problem: the data was fragmented.

Every province publishes its own construction material pricing information, but there was no simple way to access, compare, or use that data when estimating construction costs. If you wanted to understand the market, you had to jump between dozens of documents and sources.

That was the idea behind VatGiaTop. I wanted to create a platform where homeowners, people planning to build a house, and contractors could easily look up construction material prices and estimate construction costs using official provincial pricing data.

Building Something I Had Never Built Before

The funny thing is that I never planned to become a founder.

As a frontend and backend developer, I was comfortable building software. Writing code felt predictable. Business decisions did not. But once I started working on VatGiaTop, I quickly realized that building the product was only one small piece of the puzzle.

I had to think about:

• Who are the users?
• What information do they actually need?
• How should the product be positioned?
• How do people discover it?
• Why would someone trust it?

For the first time, I was forced to think beyond engineering.

Launching and Learning SEO

After launching the site, I started learning SEO seriously.

I had always known SEO existed, but I had never depended on it before. Now it was the primary growth channel for the product. The first two months looked promising.

According to Google Search Console, the website generated:

• ~7,000 impressions
• 210 clicks
• 3.1% CTR

On Bing Webmaster Tools:

• 938 impressions
• 91 clicks
• 9.7% CTR

For a brand-new website, that felt encouraging.

The Moment Everything Changed

Then the traffic started falling.

On May 11, 2026, the website reached its highest number of impressions. Shortly afterward, impressions dropped dramatically. What caught my attention was that Google seemed to be showing my pages to a much broader English-speaking audience. Impressions increased significantly, but clicks barely moved.

At one point, the site received nearly 2,000 impressions while generating only a handful of clicks. Whether Google was testing the content with a wider audience or not, the outcome was clear: those users were not finding enough value to click.

The extra visibility disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. Within days, some pages were receiving close to zero impressions.

What I Learned

The biggest lesson was simple:

Impressions are not traffic. It’s easy to get excited when numbers go up, but impressions alone don’t mean people are interested in what you’re offering.

Search engines can give a new website opportunities to prove itself. Long-term visibility depends on whether users find the content relevant enough to click and useful enough to stay.

Looking back, many of my assumptions about SEO were wrong.

I thought ranking was the goal. In reality, earning attention is the goal.

More Than an SEO Lesson

The most valuable outcome wasn’t traffic. It was perspective.

Building and launching VatGiaTop forced me to step into roles I had never experienced before: product manager, marketer, customer support agent, growth lead, and founder.

I now understand my former managers and founders much better than I did before.

When you’re responsible for the success of a product, every decision matters. You’re constantly balancing user needs, business goals, limited resources, uncertainty, and opportunity.

That’s a very different mindset from simply shipping features.

What’s Next

Despite the setbacks, I’m not giving up.

The website is still being used. People continue to sign up and share their information because they need help solving this problem.

That’s enough evidence for me to keep going. The product is far from where I want it to be, but that’s okay.

Every wrong assumption, every traffic drop, and every mistake is teaching me something new.

Two months ago, I was simply trying to build a useful website. Today, I’m learning how to build a business.

And that journey is just getting started.