Blogging Report (June 2018)- Year-Over-Year Analysis & Growth

Blogging Report (June 2018)

Welcome to my June 2018 blogging report!

The reason I do these reports is two fold.

1.) It helps me keep track of my own progress (traffic growth, search ranking increases etc.).

2.) It helps my readers get motivated to actually start a blog of their own and/or grow the website they are currently working on.

I haven’t done one of these since January 2017, but now that my blog is growing, I plan on doing them a bit more frequently.

I am also adding a section below of the key marketing strategies/methods that have helped me continue to grow my website overtime.

This is really valuable information that you should definitely review as these blogging strategies are the reason why I consistently see improvements.

With that said, let’s dive into the details…

(Please note that I still consider this blog very new…Organic growth of any website takes time and you really need to adopt a long-term mindset if you want to be successful with blogging)

Organic Traffic (June 2018)- 169 Visits

Organic Traffic for June 2018 came in at 169 visits.

Organic Traffic is really starting to show noticeable improvement thanks to the SEO work I’ve been implementing over the last 12 months.

The growth really started to happen around October of 2017 (see screenshot below) and continues to compound with the more content that is published and search engine optimization that is done.

I highlighted 3 specific reasons why I am seeing a major improvement in Organic Traffic, which is shown in the traffic chart below.

Organic Traffic all-time (by Month)

This screenshot came out a little smaller than I’d like so let me break down what it all means.

All of the red arrows represent “annotations” that I added to my Google Analytics account. They are basically notes that you can add when you make certain updates to your website, adopt a new marketing strategy etc. They are helpful to see what is working well and driving more traffic to your website.

Annotation #1: The first annotation (February 1, 2017) is when I started link building consistently for my website. I believe this is the biggest reason for my improvements as of recently. Although you can see how long it took to start seeing noticeable results from my link building efforts. Let me re-iterate that blogging and SEO is a long-term strategy, but it is a true asset you will have for life.

Annotation #2: The second annotation (August 5, 2017) is when I bought an SSL Certificate and switched to the https protocol on my website. This in combination with my link building work really made things spike in the right direction as you can see in the screenshot above.

Annotation #3: The third annotation (December 4, 2017) is when I started accepting guest posts on my website. I decline about 90% of the submissions I receive since they are low quality, but I do believe the ones I actually publish to my website help with overall organic growth.

If you’re wondering about the 4th annotation there, that is something that wouldn’t really affect my traffic. I more put that in there for my reference as it has to do with a really minor tweak.

Now let’s take a look at some very helpful data below which is year-over-year organic traffic increases.

Year-Over-Year Organic Traffic Increases (June 2018 vs. June 2017)

A helpful metric to analyze when it comes to Organic Traffic is year-over-year improvements.

Seeing your growth compared to this time last year can really reveal if your marketing efforts are paying off or need to be improved.

This data can easily be pulled from Google Analytics…See my year over-year increases below.

These are some really big improvements here and keep in mind that these are Organic Traffic statistics and not Total Traffic.

As you can see Organic Traffic is up 1,200% when comparing year-over-year (169 visits vs. 13 visits).

The blue line in the screenshot above represents June 2018 Organic Traffic and the orange line represents June 2017 Organic Traffic.

I am very happy with a 1,200% increase in Organic Traffic and plan on continuing this trend with the SEO work I have planned moving forward.

Search Engine Rankings

Over the past 12 months or so my search engine rankings are really making headway and many of the keyword phrases I’m tracking are increasing in position in the Google search results. Furthermore, many keywords are also making it to the first page of Google which is why my organic traffic is improving as you can see in my analysis above.

Below is just a partial snapshot to show that I’m hitting the first page for various terms (the reason my keywords aren’t in there is because I cannot let you know which phrases I’m targeting, that is confidential information :)).

The left column “Rank” is what position I am currently at in Google search results for a given keyword phrase.

I also wanted to highlight below the progress of a specific keyword that is highly targeted to my audience over the past 12 months or so. It was all the way down to position #120+ and now for the past 6 months it’s been on the first page of Google (and creeping towards the top 3 positions).

This SEO tool tracks the keywords rankings daily which is why there is so much variation in the screenshot below:

Blogging Strategies That Have Helped Me See This Growth

Here are a few main strategies that I use/used to really expand my audience and increase my Organic Traffic, some of which was stated above.

1.) Consistent Content Generation– I publish anywhere from 4-8 blog posts per month. This comes out to around 1-2 blog posts per week. It’s important that the content I publish is at the very minimum 500 words long. In-depth, helpful articles that are valuable to your readers is the best approach with content generation. I also make sure the content is optimized properly to be able to get recognized in the search results.

2.) On-Going Link Building Work: I am consistently writing guest blog posts for other authoritative websites in my general niche. This helps me build quality backlinks that really help my overall SEO, search engine rankings and organic traffic.

3.) Making the Switch to Https: This was an important move for me and resulted in more security for my website, increased search engine rankings and organic traffic as you can see in the data above.

4.) YouTube: I recently started working on my YouTube channel again and the additional exposure has helped increase my traffic slightly.

5.) Accepting Guest Posts: Since I started accepting guest posts, my traffic has increased. If you’re interested in this strategy yourself, make sure you only accept the highest-quality articles and check them for plagiarism with Copyscape or a similar tool.

6.) On-Going Maintenance: This includes ensuring my site is healthy from a technical SEO perspective. Fixing any broken links (404 errors), redirect chains, pages with “thin” content etc.

Remember with some of the strategies above (for example, content generation and link building) that consistency is everything.

This has to be a weekly/monthly strategy if you want to build an authority blog.

Thanks for reading my blogging report for June 2018.

I hope this information is helpful to you and sparks some ideas or motivation to try the strategies that I laid out above

If you haven’t started your blog yet, you should check out my post here.

If you have started your blog, how have your results been?