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saigon.digitalAugust grew again. The next job is turning readers into buyers.
Organic clicks rose for the third month running and are almost four times last August. Nearly all of it lands on blog posts. This report shows exactly where the commercial traffic is missing and what we are changing in September.
The month in five sentences
- Google sent 3,131 clicks in August against 2,580 in July, the best month since March and almost four times the 800 clicks of August 2025.
- Growth came from the sourcing and wholesale-clothing posts published this year: the top five gainers added 531 clicks between them, led by the Vietnam wholesale clothing market guide, which went from 89 to 263.
- The commercial side of the site (home, suppliers, products, categories, stock sales) earned 518 clicks, 17% of the total, and the homepage still ranks on page 5 or 6 for buyer terms such as 'vietnam sourcing agent'.
- In September we are pushing clicks from the blog into the commercial pages with an internal-link and call-to-action pass on the 20 biggest posts, rewriting titles on the 10 pages with the most wasted impressions, and refreshing the disavow file after 73 spam domains linked to the site in August.
- We need three things from you: approval of the 27 blog rewrites waiting since August, Google Analytics access for the reporting account, and sign-off on a new target keyword list built around terms international buyers actually search.
What we need from you
- Approve the 27 blog rewrite briefs (or tell us which to drop) by 19 September
- Grant Google Analytics 4 viewer access to reports@saigon.digital by 17 September
- Confirm the new target keyword list and the two Q4 targets by 19 September
- Share the stock-sales product categories you want to lead with in Q4 by 26 September
Data sources this month
Google Search Console (final data, 1 August 2026 to 31 August 2026) · Ahrefs snapshot 13 September 2026 · GA4 not yet connected · Core Web Vitals field data pending
Every headline number, against last month and last year
Google Search Console numbers are final for the full calendar month. Sessions and enquiries need GA4 access and will join the scorecard the month it is granted.
| Metric | Aug | July 2026 | vs July | Aug 2025 | vs Aug 2025 | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic clicks GSC | 3,131 | 2,580 | +21% | 800 | +291% | Best month since March. Still below the Dec to Mar peak. |
| Impressions GSC | 455,806 | 421,671 | +8% | 85,062 | +436% | Visibility keeps widening. |
| Click-through rate GSC | 0.69% | 0.61% | +12% | 0.94% | -27% | Third monthly rise in a row. Low by design: most impressions are informational. |
| Average position GSC | 16.8 | 15.9 | ▼ 0.9 | 19.8 | ▲ 3.0 | Slipped as new long-tail impressions arrived on page 2 and 3. |
| Pages earning clicks GSC | 419 | 392 | +7% | 92 | +355% | The library is broadening, not concentrating. |
| Non-branded top-10 keywords GSC, see definition | 98 | 99 | -1% | – | – | Flat. Rankings held while impressions grew. |
| Referring domains Ahrefs | 505 | 761 | -34% | 52 | – | Fell because spam domains dropped out. See Authority. |
| Domain Rating Ahrefs | 28 | – | – | – | – | Tracked from this month. |
| Sessions, engagement, enquiries GA4 | Not available GA4 access not yet granted to the reporting account. Sessions, engagement, conversions and AI referrals are omitted until it is. | |||||
On targets. The SEO Masterplan does not record numeric monthly targets for 2026, so this report cannot show a target column. We propose two for Q4 and ask you to confirm them: clicks to commercial pages from 518 in August to 1,000 in December, and total organic clicks from 3,131 to 4,500. Both are reachable from the opportunities in sections 6 and 7 without new content.
Thirteen months of organic clicks
Clicks peaked at 5,281 in December 2025, fell through the spring as the blog structure was rebuilt and canonicals were fixed, and have now risen for three consecutive months. August 2026 is 291% above August 2025 on clicks and 436% above on impressions.
Organic clicks per month
- Nov 45 posts/month content programme starts
- Jan ’26 Impression spike, Jan 2026 (1.1M)
- May Blog URL restructure + canonical fixes
- Jun Disavow file submitted
- Aug AWS account migration (28 Aug)
Impressions per month
The January spike to 1.1M impressions was a short-lived burst of low-quality visibility. Impressions have since settled between 389K and 456K a month on far more relevant queries.
Click-through rate per month
CTR has risen three months in a row, from 0.53% in May to 0.69% in August. It will stay under 1% while most impressions come from informational posts on page 2. The lever is the CTR-opportunity table in section 6.
Blog, brand, country and device
Four questions: which pages, which kinds of query, which countries, and which devices. Together they show where the audience actually is.
Blog posts vs commercial pages
| Clicks | vs July | Impr. | CTR | Pos. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blog (/blog/) | 2,640 | +23% | 652K | 0.40% | 15.1 |
| Commercial (everything else) | 518 | +14% | 23K | 2.25% | 28.4 |
Commercial pages convert impressions into clicks five times better than the blog (2.25% against 0.40%) but get 23K impressions against 652K. They rank on average at 28.4. Moving them onto page 1 or 2 is the single biggest growth lever left on this site.
Branded vs non-branded queries
Google hides queries with very few searches. Those 2,403 clicks (77%) are almost all long-tail blog traffic, so they behave like non-branded, but we do not count them as such. July: branded 47, non-branded 471, anonymised 2,062.
Brand queries match /valo/i. Of the queries Google does show us, 11% of clicks were branded.
Top countries by clicks
The United States remains the largest source at 606 clicks. India grew 40% to 306 and the Philippines to 182, mostly on consumer posts such as 'where are Crocs made'. Vietnam fell 16% to 308. Buyer markets we care about, the US, Australia, the UK and Singapore, all grew.
Devices
Mobile is 58% of clicks. Supplier and product pages must work as well on a phone as the blog does.
Search features
The terms we are measured on
Positions are compared only where a keyword had at least 50 impressions in both months. Two facts stand out: our primary keyword is searched from Vietnam, not by buyers, and the terms buyers do use rank on page 3 or worse.
| Keyword | Volume US, Ahrefs | Clicks | Impressions | Position | July | Change | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| vietnam custom garment manufacturing | 40 | 15 | 4,721 | 8.1 | 12.1 | ▲ 4.0 | Moved from 12.1 to 8.1, but 4,714 of its 4,721 impressions came from Vietnam and 7 from the US. Ahrefs shows 9,700 searches a month in Vietnam and 40 in the US. This is a Vietnamese-factory query, not a buyer query. Keep the ranking, drop it as a KPI. |
| vietnam clothing manufacturers | 250 | 0 | 181 | 24.6 | 29.8 | ▲ 5.2 | Improved from 29.8 to 24.6. Genuine US buyer term (250 searches). Needs a dedicated category page, not a blog post. |
| clothing manufacturers in vietnam | 150 | 1 | 99 | 24.0 | 27.8 | ▲ 3.8 | Improved from 27.8 to 24.0. Same intent as above; consolidate onto one target page. |
| vietnam sourcing agent | 200 | 0 | 122 | 44.5 | 42.6 | ▼ 1.9 | Page 5, 122 impressions. The homepage is what Google shows for it. Strong buyer intent, wrong page. |
| vietnam wholesale clothing | 40 | 23 | 150 | 9.4 | 15.4 | ▲ 6.0 | Improved from 15.4 to 9.4 and earned 23 clicks. Our best commercial-intent result this month. |
| vietnam furniture manufacturers | 50 | 0 | 15 | 35.9 | 36.0 | too few impressions | Too few impressions to judge. Category page needed. |
| steel companies in vietnam | 0 | 0 | 0 | – | – | too few impressions | No impressions on this exact term; the steel post ranks for related phrasing and earned 130 clicks. |
| sourcing from vietnam | 60 | 0 | 51 | 43.1 | 38.5 | too few impressions | Too few impressions to judge. Pillar page candidate. |
Recommendation: retire the current list and measure the eight terms below from September. They are all buyer searches from outside Vietnam, they all already have impressions, and each has a page we can improve rather than a page we have to invent.
Proposed target list from September
Terms international buyers actually type, where we already have impressions and a page to rank. Needs your approval.
| Keyword | Why | Page |
|---|---|---|
| vietnam sourcing agent | 200 US searches a month; the homepage already has 110 impressions at position 54.7 | / and a new /services page |
| vietnam clothing manufacturers | 250 US searches; position 24.6 and improving | /category/apparel (to be built out) |
| clothing manufacturers in vietnam | 150 US searches; same intent, same page | /category/apparel |
| low cost country sourcing | the cluster drew 52,552 impressions and 0 clicks in August from page 2 | /blog/best-cost-country-sourcing |
| vietnam wholesale clothing suppliers | the post earned 127 clicks from position 11.9; page 1 is within reach | /blog/vietnam-wholesale-clothing-suppliers |
| contract manufacturing companies in vietnam | /suppliers shows for it at position 58.4; a real supplier directory page can rank | /suppliers |
| buy surplus stock vietnam | the Q4 stock-sales niche agreed on 21 August; measure it from day one | /stock-sales |
| vietnam furniture manufacturers | 50 US searches, KD 46; furniture is a top-five supplier category on the platform | /category/furniture |
Top non-branded queries by clicks
Non-branded = does not match the brand pattern. Position on fewer than 50 impressions is not commented on.
| Query | Clicks | Impressions | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| vietnam wholesale clothing | 23 | 150 | 9.4 |
| vietnam clothes shopping | 16 | 344 | 7.3 |
| vietnam custom garment manufacturing | 15 | 4,721 | 8.1 |
| where to buy clothes in vietnam | 10 | 138 | 6.0 |
| clothes shopping in vietnam | 8 | 107 | 5.7 |
| nguyen khanh fish company limited | 8 | 21 | 3.4 |
| vietnam wholesale clothing suppliers | 8 | 96 | 8.4 |
| where are crocs made | 8 | 2,571 | 5.8 |
| coach made in vietnam | 7 | 366 | 2.9 |
| vietnam clothes wholesale online | 7 | 55 | 4.8 |
What people clicked, what moved, and where the easy clicks are
Blog posts hold every one of the top five places. The gainers are the sourcing and wholesale-clothing posts we published this year; the decliners are consumer curiosity posts about AirPods and Apple that were always going to fade.
| # | Page | Clicks | July | Impressions | CTR | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | /blog/vietnam-wholesale-clothing-market | 263 | 89 | 5,447 | 4.83% | 8.0 |
| 2 | /blog/airpods-made-in-china-vs-vietnam | 223 | 262 | 26,666 | 0.84% | 5.8 |
| 3 | /blog/clothing-stores-vietnam-guide | 185 | 73 | 68,722 | 0.27% | 10.1 |
| 4 | /blog/are-crocs-made-in-china-or-vietnam | 164 | 166 | 59,310 | 0.28% | 6.2 |
| 5 | /blog/vietnamese-shoe-size-to-us-guide | 164 | 183 | 20,670 | 0.79% | 4.3 |
| 6 | / | 149 | 112 | 2,022 | 7.37% | 29.7 |
| 7 | /blog/steel-companies-in-vietnam | 130 | 40 | 7,128 | 1.82% | 9.8 |
| 8 | /blog/vietnam-wholesale-clothing-suppliers | 127 | 32 | 3,119 | 4.07% | 9.6 |
| 9 | /blog/where-was-nike-made | 96 | 35 | 29,237 | 0.33% | 10.0 |
| 10 | /blog/are-jordans-made-in-china-vietnam | 84 | 56 | 17,986 | 0.47% | 4.8 |
Biggest gainers
| vietnam-wholesale-clothing-market | 89 → 263 | +174 |
| clothing-stores-vietnam-guide | 73 → 185 | +112 |
| vietnam-wholesale-clothing-suppliers | 32 → 127 | +95 |
| steel-companies-in-vietnam | 40 → 130 | +90 |
| where-was-nike-made | 35 → 96 | +61 |
Biggest declines
| airpods-made-in-china-vs-vietnam | 262 → 223 | −39 |
| are-apple-products-made-in-vietnam | 64 → 38 | −26 |
| best-sofas-and-couches | 30 → 7 | −23 |
| vietnamese-shoe-size-to-us-guide | 183 → 164 | −19 |
| does-paypal-work-in-vietnam | 70 → 55 | −15 |
First clicks this month
- /supplier/nguyen-khanh-fish-co-ltd · 12
- /blog/best-hair-factory-in-vietnam · 5
- /blog/companies-moving-from-china-to-vietnam · 5
- /blog/risks-of-global-sourcing · 4
- /vi/supplier/nguyen-khanh-fish-co-ltd · 4
Click-through opportunities
Pages with 10,000+ impressions and CTR under 1%. "Extra clicks" is what each page adds at a 2% CTR: impressions × 0.02 − current clicks. Together: +6,706 clicks a month, more than double the whole commercial section today.
| Page | Impressions | Clicks | CTR | Position | Extra at 2% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| /blog/clothing-stores-vietnam-guide | 68,722 | 185 | 0.27% | 10.1 | +1,189 |
| /blog/best-cost-country-sourcing | 53,066 | 2 | 0.00% | 19.1 | +1,059 |
| /blog/are-crocs-made-in-china-or-vietnam | 59,310 | 164 | 0.28% | 6.2 | +1,022 |
| /blog/custom-clothes-vietnam | 25,277 | 6 | 0.02% | 7.1 | +500 |
| /blog/where-was-nike-made | 29,237 | 96 | 0.33% | 10.0 | +489 |
| /blog/source-to-settle | 16,043 | 0 | 0.00% | 15.1 | +321 |
| /blog/mro-sourcing-strategies | 15,620 | 0 | 0.00% | 26.0 | +312 |
| /blog/airpods-made-in-china-vs-vietnam | 26,666 | 223 | 0.84% | 5.8 | +310 |
| /blog/are-coach-bags-made-in-vietnam | 18,212 | 60 | 0.33% | 6.9 | +304 |
| /blog/low-cost-country-sourcing-risks | 14,347 | 1 | 0.01% | 53.8 | +286 |
The clothing-stores guide alone shows 68,722 impressions and earns 185 clicks. Half of those impressions come from page 2 fragments Google has indexed as separate results, so the fix is structural (one canonical section, one title) as much as editorial. The best-cost-country-sourcing post is the largest untouched asset on the site: 53,066 impressions at position 19.1 and 2 clicks.
Referring domains, and the spam we are filtering out
Referring domains as counted by Ahrefs fell from 761 to 505. That is not lost authority. Ahrefs pruned hundreds of spam domains that were pointing at the site, and a new wave arrived in August.
Referring domains by month (Ahrefs)
The February peak of 943 was inflated by the same kind of spam. The disavow file we submitted in June covers the earlier wave, not this one.
Spam watch. Ahrefs found 109 domains linking to valovietnam.com for the first time in August. 73 of them are numeric .xyz domains, .store domains with link-selling names, or DR-zero sites. This pattern is automated and not caused by anything we or you did. We will add the August domains to the disavow file by 20 September and check monthly. No ranking damage is visible yet.
Legitimate new domains this month: bebee.com (DR 67), quero.party (DR 45).
Indexing, speed and crawl access
August was a stable month technically. The metadata rewrite prepared in August went live on 3 September and will show in September's data.
Pages Google shows
Google showed 3,270 URLs from the domain in August. 419 earned a click. The remaining pages are mostly supplier and product listings with thin templated text, which is why they are shown and not clicked.
Core Web Vitals
Pending
Core Web Vitals field data could not be retrieved when this report was frozen (API quota). It will appear next month with a stated 28-day window. The May report recorded TTFB at 0.8s and LCP at 1.8s after the server work.
Changes shipped
- AWS account migration completed on 28 August with no downtime; the old server was decommissioned on 4 September.
- Title, description and H1 rewrite for 764 URLs prepared in August and shipped to production on 3 September: titles over 60 characters went from many to 0, pages with more than one H1 from 577 to 10.
- Services vertical launched on 8 September, giving buyer-intent 'sourcing agent' and 'sourcing partner' queries a page of their own for the first time.
- Blog URL fragments are being indexed as separate results (see the CTR table). Fix scheduled for September.
Being cited, not just ranked
Buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity 'who can source X from Vietnam' instead of searching Google. Three things matter: can the engines read the site, do they send visitors, and do they cite VALO when asked.
AI crawler access
robots.txt allows every AI crawler we checked (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot). The site also serves an llms.txt file, which the newer AI crawlers read first.
Checked 13 September 2026. Re-checked every month because deployments change it.
AI referral traffic
Needs GA4
Sessions from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are measured in GA4. We cannot see them until the reporting account is given access. This is the first ask in this report.
Prompt panel
From September we run a fixed panel of buyer prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on the same day each month and record whether VALO is cited and which competitors are. The panel:
- Best B2B sourcing platforms for Vietnam manufacturers
- How do I find verified suppliers in Vietnam?
- Vietnam clothing manufacturers for small brands
- Where can I buy surplus stock and deadstock from Vietnam factories?
- Vietnam vs China manufacturing quality 2026
- and 3 more
Three problems, with evidence and the fix
Commercial pages are invisible to buyers
- Evidence
- 518 of 3,131 clicks went to non-blog pages. The homepage ranks 54.7 for 'vietnam sourcing agent' (110 impressions) and 23.0 for 'vietnam b2b'. The /suppliers page ranks 58.4 for 'contract manufacturing companies in vietnam'.
- Why
- Category, supplier and product pages carry templated titles and little unique text, and the blog, which holds the authority, barely links to them.
- Change
- Metadata rewrite is live as of 3 September. In September we add contextual links and a sourcing call-to-action to the 20 largest posts, and write real copy for the top five category pages.
The keyword list measures the wrong audience
- Evidence
- Our primary keyword, 'vietnam custom garment manufacturing', drew 4,714 of its 4,721 impressions from Vietnam. The consumer posts that rank best ('where are Crocs made', 'where are AirPods made') bring readers from India and the Philippines who are not sourcing buyers.
- Why
- The list was built on search volume, not on who is searching or why.
- Change
- Replace it with the eight buyer terms in section 5, all searched from the US, UK, Australia and Singapore, and report against those from September.
Spam links keep arriving
- Evidence
- 109 new referring domains in August, 73 of them spam. Referring domains fell from 761 to 505 as Ahrefs removed the earlier wave.
- Why
- Automated link-farm networks target any site whose visibility is rising. It is not caused by anything on the site.
- Change
- Update the disavow file with the August domains by 20 September and add a monthly spam check to this report.
What we did in August, what happens in September
Completed in August
| Task | Status |
|---|---|
| Export and sourcing checklist series, 12 posts Factory visit, export documentation, packaging, customs clearance, container loading, post-delivery claims and six more. 3 published in August, 9 scheduled for September. link | In progress |
| Audit and rewrite briefs for 27 existing posts Rewrite documents complete for 27 posts (t-shirts, table and chair sets, steel fabrication, coffee import, industrial parks and others). Awaiting VALO approval before publishing. link | Awaiting approval |
| Title, description and H1 rewrite, 764 URLs Sheet prepared, templates fixed underneath. Shipped to production 3 September. link | Done |
| AWS account migration Backend moved to the VALO account on 28 August. Old infrastructure retired 4 September. | Done |
| Quarterly review and Q4 direction Quarterly report delivered 14 August. Q4 focus on the surplus and stock-sales niche agreed 21 August. | Done |
| August monthly report This document, generated from frozen Search Console and Ahrefs data with automated reconciliation checks. | Done |
September plan
- Internal-link and call-to-action pass on the 20 largest blog posts, pointing to /suppliers, /rfq and the relevant category
- Rewrite titles and opening sections of the 10 pages in the CTR-opportunity table; merge indexed fragments into one canonical result
- Expand /blog/best-cost-country-sourcing into the definitive guide (comparison table, Vietnam cost data, buyer checklist) and build five internal links to it
- Write real copy for the five largest category pages (apparel, furniture, agriculture, construction materials, steel)
- Add August spam domains to the disavow file
- Publish the 9 remaining checklist posts and the approved rewrites
- Connect GA4 and record a Core Web Vitals baseline
What we need from VALO Vietnam
- Approve the 27 blog rewrite briefs (or tell us which to drop) by 19 September
- Grant Google Analytics 4 viewer access to reports@saigon.digital by 17 September
- Confirm the new target keyword list and the two Q4 targets by 19 September
- Share the stock-sales product categories you want to lead with in Q4 by 26 September
Definitions, sources and checks
Every number in this report can be traced to a source and a date. If a definition changes, we date the change here.
Definitions
- Reporting window
- 1 August 2026 to 31 August 2026, inclusive. Comparisons: July 2026 (1 July 2026 to 31 July 2026) and August 2025.
- Organic clicks, impressions, CTR, position
- Google Search Console, property sc-domain:valovietnam.com, search type web, final data. Average position is impression-weighted.
- Branded query
- Query matching /valo/i. Anonymised queries are reported separately and never assigned to either side.
- Blog vs commercial
- Blog = URL contains /blog/. Commercial = every other URL on the domain (home, suppliers, products, categories, stock sales, services).
- Blog post
- Canonical English post URL matching ^https://valovietnam\.com/blog/[^/?#]+/?$. Translations, category and pagination pages are excluded. 191 posts earned clicks in August out of 382 shown by Google.
- Non-branded top-10 keyword
- a non-branded query with at least 100 impressions in the month and an average position of 10.0 or better.
- Position change
- Only commented on when the keyword had at least 50 impressions in both months.
- Referring domains, Domain Rating, keyword volume
- Ahrefs, snapshot 13 September 2026. Third-party estimates, restated each month.
- Suspicious new domain
- Numeric or throwaway TLD (.xyz, .store, .shop, .icu), link-selling names, or Domain Rating under 5.
- Commercial page
- Any URL that is not a blog post: homepage, /suppliers, /supplier/*, /products, /product/*, /category/*, /wholesale, /stock-sales, /rfq, /services and their Vietnamese versions.
- Gainers and decliners
- Change in clicks between July and August for the same URL, URL fragments merged into their page.
- First clicks
- URLs with at least one click in August and none in July.
Automated checks passed before publishing
This report was generated by Saigon Digital's reporting pipeline. Numbers are pulled by API, frozen, and every figure in the narrative is verified against the frozen data. Data frozen 13 Sept 2026, 12:33 ICT.
Extra pulls used in the narrative
- GSC query 'vietnam custom garment manufacturing' by country, August: Vietnam 15 clicks / 4,714 impressions / 8.1; United States 0 / 7 / 7.3.
- GSC queries containing 'country sourcing', August: 25 queries, 0 clicks, 52,552 impressions; top page /blog/best-cost-country-sourcing at 51,240 impressions, position 19.3 (53,066 with fragments merged).
- GSC homepage queries, August: 'vietnam sourcing agent' 0 / 110 / 54.7; 'vietnam b2b' 0 / 90 / 23.0; 'suppliers in vietnam' 0 / 43 / 47.3.
- GSC /suppliers queries, August: 'contract manufacturing companies in vietnam' 0 / 23 / 58.4.
- Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Vietnam: 'vietnam custom garment manufacturing' 9,700 searches a month.
- VALO SEO Masterplan (Content and Blog Audit tabs) for August task rows; Phase 1 metadata report of 8 September for the 764-URL rewrite figures.
- Top five gainers total: 174 + 111 + 95 + 90 + 61 = 531.