Traffic

So here we are at month 2 of our Niche Project. And we’re not expecting too much again at this stage. It’s still very early days in the life of a new website. And we’re rewarded with the following graph that shows exactly that.

This month only 109 users visited the website. 67 were from Organic traffic whilst much of the rest was direct which was probably my testing etc. again. But 67 is more than the 5 we got last month!

You can see from the above graph though that traffic is increasing as the month progresses. We may also be benefiting a little from some Christmas traffic.

This graph from ‘search console’ shows that our impressions are going in the right direction as the month progresses too. This is a great way to check that everything is moving in the right direction even in the absence of ‘results’.

Also, a graph I love to take a look at (not least because you get some very pretty looking graphs) to see how things are progressing is the ‘active users’ report in Google Analytics. (See Audience > Active Users).

This shows a rolling calculation of the number of users visiting the site. So for example, this graph shows a rolling total from the last 7 days over the course of the month. This even more clearly shows how things are progressing. Numbers still very low of course.

This shows a rolling 14-day graph since the start of the project.

Highlights: What I did this month

There were two main focuses that I think are worth discussing this month.

• Niching my niche
• Keyword Golden Ration (KGR) Article Implementation

Content – Niching my niche

I think it’s fair to say that I had an Authority Website in mind when starting this project. And by authority website, I mean not a ‘micro-niche’. The term Authority site and Niche site are used interchangeably by many whilst others have a definition in their mind what each is but they are certainly not terms that are universally shared.

For the purpose of this conversation, this is my interpretation.

• Micro-Niche – A very very focused website on a ‘smaller’ niche, or even subset of a niche. An example of a micro-niche might be ‘Dog Food’.
• Authority Site – An Authority Site would capture a much wider niche, so for example, if we were to widen the ‘Dog Food’ niche we might branch out in to Cat Food or Dog Beds and Toys. But an Authority site, in my opinion, would be widening the focus further still in to ‘Dog Supplies’ covering everything that you might ever need when owning a dog or further still you might branch out in to ‘Pet Supplies’ covering all sorts of different animals.

As such my website started out at the ‘Pet Supplies’ level and I created 3 different categories within that niche with plans for many more and had articles written for each category.

However, I’ve had a change of plan in terms of my approach. In order to get traction faster, I need to be more focused on the Niche I am targeting. By going too broad too soon, I risk a slower start due to a lack of relevance.

So, I’m focusing on just one of those categories. Focusing on the big ticket items first and then the small items too which will all help me become an authority on one specific topic. Only when I feel that I am getting good movement with this first niche will I branch back out in to additional categories.

Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) Article Implementation

I recently learned about a keyword research approach made popular by Doug Cunnington called the Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR). The concept is incredibly simple and helps you identify those low traffic, long tail keywords that are extremely uncompetitive.

Given this ratio, the theory is that it should be very easy to rank for these keywords even for a new site with very little authority.

This can be helpful for a new site to start getting some traffic earlier than they would normally expect to do so and if you can find some ‘money’ keywords that fit the KGR criteria too, you might be able to start getting some early income too.

The math and process are simple. Type the following in to Google:

Step 1: Find a keyword with very few competing articles

Allintitle: {keyword]

And then make note of the number of search results. E.g.

Step 2: Check the volume of each keyword

You can use your favorite keyword research tool for this, but in this example, I’ve just used the ‘keyword everywhere’ chrome plugin as follows:

The search volume must be below 250 per month to be a ‘golden keyword’. If search volume is higher then you’re likely not in the sweet spot.

Step 3: The math

You simply divide the ‘allintitle’ number by the search volume as follows:

Number of ‘allintitle:’ results / Search volume per month
= 1/30
= 0.03

If the result is below 0.25 then you’ve found a KGR keyword! Congratulations! The above example shows a result of 0.03 so this would be considered a KGR Keyword.

I decided to focus on creating a lot of KGR content this month to really kickstart my traffic and start getting me some good keyword rankings. I’ll report back next month on how that is working out.

Challenges

The biggest challenge this month was once again to do with writers. I lost one of my writers and re-recruited so that I was back at the same level (4).

Not all writers are delivering content on time and therefore getting content on to the site is taking a bit longer than I had hoped and as you can see there were only 16 this month. Still a good number so not too unhappy with that.

Conclusion

Still early days but things all going in the right direction. The early days of any project like this are always the most challenging. It can be demoralizing at times spending so much time and resources on a project to see very little returns.

Especially if you’ve not done this kid of work before and you start to doubt yourself. It comes to us all. Even when you have, no project is guaranteed to be a resounding success so you can still have dark times of self-doubt.

But…in these early days, you just need to keep the faith and push on.