Blogging Report (November 2018) – Get Used To Monthly Traffic Fluctuation

Blogging Report (November 2018)

As a blogger you need to be prepared for some monthly fluctuation in in terms of organic traffic.

Although it’s good to analyze the monthly trend, it’s even better to compare your traffic data year-over-year versus month-over-month.

So even though my organic traffic is down slightly month-over-month, I’m still seeing good increases when comparing the data year-over-year.

This shows that my SEO work and blogging efforts are paying off and resulting in natural organic growth.

Was November my best month to date?

No.

But my long-term view/mindset keeps me from getting discouraged. I feel that too many people in the blogging space expect to see incredible growth, month in and month out when that is just not realistic.

Of course this is possible depending on the person, niche and blog, but please look at the long-term trend instead of a narrow monthly view.

It’s also important to point out that traffic can sometimes slow down a bit around November and December due to the holidays.

But these months are perfect for creating concrete goals and strategizing for the new year to come.

With that being said, let’s take a look at my blogging results for November 2018.

Organic Traffic (November 2018)- 143 Visits

Organic traffic in November 2018 came in at 143 organic search visits.

This is down slightly when comparing month-over-month but I am still up when comparing year-over-year.

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

Organic traffic is up 22.22% when comparing year-over-year (143 vs. 117).

An interesting thing about this comparison, is that November of 2017 is when my blog really started to see its first growth spurt.

Back then (Nov. 2017), that was my highest month in regards to organic traffic in around 12 months.

Now the reason I’m stating this is because being up 22.22% year-over-year when that was at one point my best month in organic traffic is still pretty good.

Let’s take a look at my organic traffic chart overtime to understand this better:

You can see the growth I’m talking about when looking back at November 2017 (and months prior) and although there’s been some fluctuation month-over-month recently, I am indeed UP when comparing Nov. 2018 to Nov. 2017.

Next Steps for Increasing My Blog Traffic

One very key point to highlight is that on November 28, 2018, I increased my website speed by around 3 seconds.

I believe this is really going to help moving into the new year, as my website was pretty “sluggish” prior.

As for other strategies I plan on implementing, much of this remains the same month-in and month out.

1.) Create Long-Form & High Quality Content: Part of the reason for the growth I have seen thus far with my blog, is due to creating quality and in-depth blog articles that get ranked in Google (targeting both broad and long-tail keyword phrases). When I first started this blog in 2016, my posts were much shorter in content and I believe not as valuable as they are today. You always want to try to provide as much helpful information to your readers as possible, so they keep coming back for more. I will continue to push out as much quality content as I can on a consistent basis.

2.) Focus on My YouTube Channel: Although my YouTube channel is very small still, I’ve noticed since I’ve been more consistent with my video content creation, it has steadily been growing each month (more so than in the past). In return, because I leave my blog links in my video description, this has driven some nice extra referral traffic to my website and resulted in more subscribers to my email list. A lot of people spend their time on YouTube these days and love watching videos to find the information they are looking for. If you don’t have your own channel yet, I encourage starting one up. You can see and subscribe to my YouTube channel here. It’s still a work in progress!

3.) Guest Posting on High Domain Authority Sites: Link building is a strategy that I can be a bit more consistent with, especially since it’s so vital to the organic growth for any website. Google wants to rank websites that have a strong backlink portfolio so it’s essential to work on this on a monthly basis. I’m really going to refine my guest posting strategy, and try to publish articles on higher domain authority websites for the best results. This should yield in higher search engine rankings, increased organic traffic and also increased referral traffic.

Make sure to have a plan each month for your website. You do not want to approach this blindly.

Keep producing content for people to see, answer questions, solve problems and always engage with your audience.

Learn from any mistakes or hurdles you encounter and always be fine tuning your efforts.

How have your results been?

Are you having success with any particular strategy?