Search Traffic - How long does it take? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

In my experience, it takes about a year from starting blogging.

Google traffic is highly-dependent on what you're writing about and the SEO tools you use.

I'd recommend Yoast for Wordpress. I've never purposely written an article for Google, but keep an eye out for the popular terms. Credit Cards, personal finance, and budgets are all very popular on Google – might help to include other words with these key phrases.

I get a lot of Google traffic to my freebies and credit card articles. Only been writing for 3 months.

I've had suburbanfinance.com up and running since late April/early May. I started getting search engine traffic (other than people looking up "suburban finance") about a month ago. However, it's only about 14% of my traffic. It's still really low. I get a lot from one random keyword that I wasn't' really trying to optimize for.  On Add Vodka I can't really remember, but my search engine traffic didn't really take off until a year and a half after it's launch. That was back when I knew nothing about it though.. not that I know that much now ;)

I'm 6 months in and I don't feel like my blog has reached a point where it has taken off in search. I probably get 10-20 views per day from search on average. I optimize my posts with Yoast, but I don't really do keyword research. Search is my number 2 referrer over the last 30 days behind Reddit and like 2 views ahead of Twitter.

I never got into SEO (and still only dabble in it), so search engine traffic took me years to ramp up.

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate the insight. I wasn't able to tell if my results (or, rather, lack thereof) are reasonable or not since there is apparently a wide range among everyone (from several hundred per day after a few months to not much of anything for up to a year).

Many of you have mentioned optimizing with Yoast. I have been using Yoast from day 1 and have made sure to get the "green dot" on every post. I don't necessarily do keyword research ahead of time, but I do identify the main keyword I'm writing around and it's always an available option in the auto suggestion box so I know I'm not writing on anything too obscure. After almost 2 months with about 2-3 posts per week, I'm not really getting any traffic yet. Maybe 1-2 a day (although 50% is attributed to someone searching for my exact website name and it's always from the same place in Minnesota – weird!).

I guess I'll just have to keep plugging away and monitoring. It's probably too early to fret over just yet…thanks, guys!

The Passive Income Earner said:

It took me 1 year to reach PR3 and I was on Blogger at the time. I had no idea what I was doing and had done no research. One day I decided to get started and I needed to do it and got going with Blogger. Had I step back to learn more, I probably would not have started … I had no SEO plugins with Blogger, you just had to write good content. I don't think SEO plugins are all there is to be … I have posts with little SEO that do much better than those with good SEO. The topic is really important as well as the length and the format of the article. I often have graphs and tables in my posts, it's not just text to support what I write.

When you start, comment on other blogs. It's one of your only marketing strategy that will get you noticed in my opinion.

Google figured out that my site is about investing and will promote my investing articles much faster. When I write about mortgage, even though it can be a great article, it's an off topic for my site and I usually don't see the article in my search.

As you blog, you need to use your analytics to understand how Google sees you and you choose to accept that or work hard to change that perception. As much as you want to focus on specific keywords, Google might see other keywords and find those more appropriate.

Eventually, you need to have links from many other sites back to your … That's a whole different strategy.

These days, I use Long Tail Pro to research keywords and the last 3 posts I did that way ranked on the first page of the keywords within a week. Can't say if they will stay there, but it adds to all the searches landing on my site.

I had a quick look at my stats when I started. I had not installed analytics for the first month :( but after that it started picking up at 50, 100 and 150 per week within the first 3 months. I had no SEO with Blogger. I was writing about investing and doing company analysis and it got picked up. Those are still generating traffic even now but the content should get refreshed. I had a look at your site and your topic is broad. Out of your 3 posts per week, one is a weekly link so you really have only 2 posts per week with meaty content. As an example, write a number of post on HOA and link them together. Research HOA if that matters. The faster google understand what your site is about, the better it will be.

Once I organized my heading at the top (not by categories – I manually organize them), it had a big impact on Google too. I was helping them understand my blog and in turn I got traffic for it.

Anyways, some of my thoughts. I certainly did not break any records getting to where I am but I figured out how to keep blogging while being super busy with work and kids.

Sorry, wrong number for searches. Those mentioned were overall traffic. My searches were 0 for the first month (no analytics), close to nothing for the second month, then 15 per week and then 50 per week. 

Post edited 2:23 pm – August 24, 2013 by The Passive Income Earner

I really did not do so good when I started so I can't say for other bloggers … My url was a really bad choice and has not help because it helps google understand the major topic.

As for other bloggers's topic, it may very well have to do with posts that have been linked to by bigger sites. Commenting on other blogs and sharing links is really important early on in my view.

I run tests every now and again. For example, I did carnivals for over 6 months and saw no traffic increase from them so I stopped them completely and I was not penalized.

I had a look at your HOA post and it ranks on the third page for "HOAs good or bad", the key is to understand if those are the right keywords that people search for. I definitely recommend a tool like Long Tail Pro to see how people search. You can use the post to see if you can rank higher. It's really a learning exercice. Also, your headings are using h4 and I heard you want to use h1 for title and h2 for sub heading. By using h4, you are telling the search engines it's not as important. I would review ALL your posts because of that. You meta keywords don't exists … I see you use Yoast but I don't see the keyword. All I did is look at the html source (that's how the search engine see the site :) it's just characters and they use the tags to understand the content.

Anyways, Google runs algorithm and heuristic to assess the quality of a link. There are many many variables.

You can ask a new blogger on post that have search traffic and do an analysis on it if you want to learn. 

@Financial Independence – I optimize SEO for every article (post) and page that I want to rank in Google. Something like the "contact us" or the "privacy policy" pages I don't optimize. I try to get every light to turn green, plus go beyond that by getting the keyword density to around 2%. It's not always possible and the Flesch score is usually not green. In my experience it doesn't really matter – the keyword presence in the title and meta description and its density in content are by far the most important ones to focus on.