I tend to create a number of small side projects every year. Mostly because I either need a slightly customized alternative to existing products ( notes.kordes.dev ) or simply because I want to try out some new tech. Usually both.

Over some weekend in May 2019 I created a Spotify collage generator . A super simple ( source ) page that generates a 3x3 collage of your most-listened-to artists on Spotify. Thought the product was cool but could be expanded - as many others have done ( tapmusic , alexpwhite collage ) - by adding more options (different collage sizes, different time spans, writing artists names on the images). Nonetheless, I put the page on the subdomain, added Google Analytics and moved on. Didn't post it anywhere or put any effort into making it popular.

However, 8 months later it suddenly got a lot of traction.

Traction timeline

Jun 1, 2019 - Sep 29, 2019

The first two months of having the project up I didn't get any real traction. Most days the project saw between 0 and 10 users. There was a spike on Aug 27th to 31 users and that's about it. Nothing to write home about.

Sep 28, 2019 - Oct 5, 2019

I still did not share the project anywhere, but out of nowhere the project attracted ~600 users in the span of 3 days.

My first thought was someone found it interesting and shared it on a popular social page. Except that wasn't the case: 584/614 users came from Google. The majority from the UK (172), US (120) and Argentina (70) with other countries ~20 and fewer.

Oct 5, 2019 - Jan 22, 2020

Then back to months of nothing. I don't have a good explanation for the spike in October, but after I noticed it I posted the project on r/webdev Showoff Saturday , which received (at least) 1 downvote and no upvotes. It did nothing for popularity.

Jan 22, 2020 - Jan 25, 2020

Then the big boom! Suddenly, out of nowhere, the project is getting traction. There have been no changes whatsoever since the launch. It wasn't posted anywhere and the majority of traffic is from Google.

Analysis (Jan 22 - Jan 25)

Acquisition

Organic search: 2,235

Referrals: 1,542

Direct: 56

Social: 34

Note: referrals

Referrals are mostly meaningless, as the way the project works is after a user logs in to Spotify, it gets redirected back to the project (where it fetches the images) and that counts as a referral from Spotify.

Mobile vs desktop

Mobile: 2,221 (95.8%)

Desktop: 98 (4.2%)

Search

Search console:

The search console above includes everything on the domain *kordes.dev, including this blog. But this blog receives 20-30 users a day and the first phrase related to the blog is 10th. Negligible

The best 4 ranking phrases past 7 days:

Query	Clicks	Impressions
collage generator spotify	960	2,953
collage generator for spotify	607	1,935
spotify collage generator	268	1,074
spotify collage	139	1,047

The project ranks 2nd for "collage generator spotify" on both desktop and mobile, after alexpwhite . But if you type in just "spotify collage" on mobile, you get this:

The result is still 2nd, but it's tied to the Google images result with the little "Feedback" button on the bottom right. It resembles the Google previews, except it's not much of a preview. The images above are not related to the project. But I assume it still dictates some sort of credibility to the average user.

Conclusion

Nothing really. More questions than answers. The project suddenly started ranking really well on mobile Google search and I'm really interested in why. It has been untouched since launch and has nothing but 25 words on the page. Even shouts out tapmusic, the inspiration for the project.

If anyone reading this with a better understanding of SEO knows why shoot me an email at devkordes at gmail.com.

For now, I'm just happy it's doing great and hope it serves people well!