This is Part 2 of my SEO case study. Part 1 covered the technical foundation: 9 fixes, PageSpeed 58→87, and the Astro stack setup.

In Part 1, I documented the baseline of rafaelroot.com: zero indexation, zero impressions, zero clicks. Astro SSG, strict technical SEO, mobile PageSpeed from 58 to 87.

Now for the growth phase. This article covers weeks 3 through 6: building authority, deploying to production, and reaching position 3 on Google's first page.

📊 TL;DR — Weeks 3 to 6

Metric Start Week 6

Indexed pages 0/16

16/16 (100%)

Primary query position 100+

#3 (page 1)

Weekly impressions 0 847

CTR (main query) — 12.4%

Backlinks 0

7 high-quality

Lighthouse scores 87/99/99/99 100/100/100/100

⚡ 10-Day Indexation Checkpoint

Ten days after submitting the sitemap, Google indexed all 16 URLs. Complete coverage.

🎯 CHECKPOINT — Week 2 (03/14/2026)

• Indexed Pages: 16/16

• Impressions: 23 | Clicks: 2 | Position: 47.3

Why so fast?

• Clean sitemap — 16 URLs, zero 404s, no redirect chains

• Semantic HTML — Hierarchical headings + valid JSON-LD schemas

• ~50ms TTFB — Googlebot parses static files instantly

🏗️ Production Deploy: Nginx Tuned for SEO

Brotli + Gzip compression

Brotli compresses ~8-9% better than gzip for HTML. Automatic gzip fallback for older clients:

brotli on; brotli_comp_level 6; brotli_static on; brotli_min_length 256; brotli_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript  text/xml application/xml text/javascript image/svg+xml font/woff2;

brotli on; brotli_comp_level 6; brotli_static on; brotli_min_length 256; brotli_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript  text/xml application/xml text/javascript image/svg+xml font/woff2;

gzip on; gzip_vary on; gzip_proxied any; gzip_comp_level 4;`

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Measured results:

Encoding Size Reduction

Uncompressed 18,408 bytes —

Gzip 5,372 bytes -70.8%

Brotli 4,897 bytes -73.4%

💡 475 bytes less than gzip per request. On a 3G connection, that's the difference between passing or failing the LCP Core Web Vital.

HTTPS + HTTP/2 + Security headers

Full server block with Let's Encrypt SSL, HSTS preload, CSP, and all 6 security headers. Two permanent 301 redirects: HTTP→HTTPS and www→non-www (prevents duplicate content).

Layered cache strategy

Type Cache Why

CSS, JS, fonts, images 1 year, immutable

Hash in filename = never changes

HTML 1 day, must-revalidate

Content may update

XML (sitemap) 1 hour Crawlers need fresh data

Returning visitors download zero assets — only HTML is revalidated.

Production TTFB

Homepage: 94ms | Blog post: 73ms | Protocol: HTTP/2 | Encoding: Brotli

📈 GA4 Dashboard for SEO

Rankings mean nothing if users bounce. I configured GA4 with custom events:

// Scroll depth tracking — zero dependencies const observer = new IntersectionObserver((entries) => {  entries.forEach((entry) => {  if (entry.isIntersecting) {  gtag('event', 'scroll_depth', {  section: entry.target.id,  percent: entry.target.dataset.depth  });  }  }); }, { threshold: 0.5 });

// Scroll depth tracking — zero dependencies const observer = new IntersectionObserver((entries) => {  entries.forEach((entry) => {  if (entry.isIntersecting) {  gtag('event', 'scroll_depth', {  section: entry.target.id,  percent: entry.target.dataset.depth  });  }  }); }, { threshold: 0.5 });

document.querySelectorAll('section[data-depth]').forEach(s => observer.observe(s));`

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The SEO dashboard correlates Search Console (impressions, CTR, position) with GA4 (scroll depth, time-on-page, bounce rate).

🔗 Link Building: Authority Footholds

No guest post spam. Instead, I built contextual presence on platforms Google already trusts:

Platform Type DA Context

1 dev.to Original article 61 Full case study with canonical_url

2 GitHub Profile + README 96 Bio + pinned repo with contextual link

3 Stack Overflow Profile 82 Website field

4 LinkedIn Profile + article 98 Featured section + native post

5 npm Published package 75 Homepage field

6 Twitter/X Profile + thread 94 Bio and tweet with link

🔥 DEV.TO canonical hack: Using canonical_url in dev.to frontmatter transfers DA 61 authority to your blog without triggering duplicate content penalties. This article does exactly that.

The key insight: each link has context — it's not a naked URL in an empty bio.

🌍 Multilingual Content: The i18n Multiplier

5 languages (pt-BR, pt-PT, en, es, ru) — each article natively written, not machine-translated.

Why this matters:

• Google detects auto-translated content as low quality

• Each version ranks independently for queries in that language

• hreflang tags mathematically link all versions

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📊 Results: 6 Weeks of Data

Week Impressions Clicks CTR Avg. Position

1 0 0 — —

2 23 2 8.7% 47.3

3 89 7 7.9% 28.1

4 234 21 9.0% 14.7

5 512 48 9.4% 7.2

6 847 105 12.4% 3.8

Top queries

Query Position CTR

rafael cavalcanti da silva #3 14.2%

rafaelroot #1 28.6%

rafael cavalcanti developer #5 8.9%

SERP comparison — "rafael cavalcanti da silva"

Position Baseline Week 6

1 jusbrasil.com.br jusbrasil.com.br

2 br.linkedin.com br.linkedin.com

3 g1.globo.com

rafaelroot.com ✅

Separating technical vs. content impact

Technical fixes (weeks 1-2): complete indexation in 10 days, PageSpeed 87, zero Search Console errors.

Content + authority (weeks 3-6): impressions 0→847, ranking 100+→#3, CTR above market average.

The technical foundation let Google index quickly. But it was content and backlinks that moved the ranking.

💡 Lesson Learned: Don't Shorten Your Brand Name

I tested using the shorter "Rafael Cavalcanti" in titles. The logic: it's a substring, so coverage should be additive.

It wasn't. Within days, I lost ranking for the full name query. Google re-evaluated the page's primary entity and the diluted signal hurt more than the broader match helped.

Fix: Reverted all , meta descriptions, og:site_name back to "Rafael Cavalcanti da Silva". The short form stays only in alternateName in structured data.

Takeaway: For personal brand SEO, consistency > coverage. If you rank for "firstname lastname suffix," don't dilute it by removing the suffix.

🚀 Post-Launch Optimizations (Updates 2-4)

These updates happened after the initial 6-week period and are fully documented in the canonical article.

Lighthouse: 100/100/100/100

Three targeted fixes to reach perfect scores:

Issue Before After Fix

LCP render delay 920ms 0 Replaced JS font injection with CSS media="print" onload pattern

Missing og:image:alt SEO 99 100 Added dynamic og:image:alt + twitter:image:alt on all pages

CSS critical chain 922ms 0

build.inlineStylesheets: 'always' — zero external CSS

Forced reflow 39ms 0 Batched getBoundingClientRect() reads before DOM writes

Sitemap: from basic to fully optimized

Feature Before After

`` ❌ ✅ All 35 URLs

`` ❌ ✅ Per-page-type

`` ❌ ✅ Hierarchy (1.0→0.5)

Blog hreflang ❌ ✅ Cross-language links (5 locales)

Redirect URLs Leaking ❌ Filtered ✅

`` ❌ ✅ 15 image entries

The trickiest part: @astrojs/sitemap doesn't support blog posts with different slugs per locale. Solution: a blogTranslations map in serialize() that links all 5 versions:

const blogTranslations = {  'seo-case-study-part-1': {  'pt-BR': '/blog/case-study-seo-do-zero-ao-google-parte-1/',  'en': '/en/blog/seo-case-study-google-ranking-part-1/',  'es': '/es/blog/caso-estudio-seo-de-cero-a-google-parte-1/',  } };

const blogTranslations = {  'seo-case-study-part-1': {  'pt-BR': '/blog/case-study-seo-do-zero-ao-google-parte-1/',  'en': '/en/blog/seo-case-study-google-ranking-part-1/',  'es': '/es/blog/caso-estudio-seo-de-cero-a-google-parte-1/',  } };

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Image SEO + sitemap indexing

• Renamed image.png → rafael-cavalcanti-da-silva-fullstack-developer.png

• Created a custom Astro integration (sitemapImageInjector) that injects tags into sitemap XML post-build

• 15 image entries enabling Google Image Search discovery

Custom 404 page + i18n coverage

Multilingual 404 page with contextual navigation. Added 55+ translation keys and the missing Russian "Trajetória" page.

📋 Full Checklist — Weeks 3-6

• ✅ 16/16 URLs indexed (100% coverage)

• ✅ GA4 with scroll depth + time-on-page tracking

• ✅ 7 high-quality backlinks built

• ✅ dev.to article with canonical link

• ✅ 5 languages, natively written

• ✅ hreflang validated across all versions

• ✅ Nginx: Brotli + HTTP/2 + HSTS + 6 security headers

• ✅ TTFB: 73-94ms in production

• ✅ Lighthouse: 100/100/100/100

• ✅ Sitemap: 35 URLs + priorities + image indexing

• ✅ "rafael cavalcanti da silva" → position 3

• ✅ "rafaelroot" → position 1

• ✅ CTR 12.4% (above market average)

What's Next (Part 3)

• A/B titles and meta descriptions for CTR optimization

• Real Core Web Vitals field data (CrUX) vs. lab (Lighthouse)

• Cannibalization analysis across multilingual versions

• Final goal: position 1

Community Feedback

The Part 1 article on dev.to generated valuable feedback:

@apogeewatcher suggested separating results into categories (indexation, ranking, CTR, on-page performance) instead of attributing everything to a single change. That suggestion directly influenced the "Separating technical vs. content impact" section above.

@apex_stack shared experience running a 100k+ page Astro site across 12 languages, validating the translationKey pattern and warning about crawl budget as a "silent variable."

@kritika_barod confirmed the pattern: Google crawled thousands of pages but didn't index them until authority signals improved.

Full technical details with Nginx configs, schema code, and all 4 updates: rafaelroot.com/en/blog/seo-case-study-google-ranking-part-2/

Found this useful? Drop a 🦄 and follow for Part 3 — or check out rafaelroot.com to see everything in action.