I was chatting with a blogger yesterday about search engine traffic. They asked me how much traffic I got to my blogs from Search Engines each day and when I told them that it was between 6000-8000 unique visitors a day (to Digital Photography School) their reaction was:
‘Can you tell me how to get that much traffic to my blog from Google?’
Today I emailed them this screen shot from Google Analytics of the DPS blog (click to enlarge – note, this doesn’t include DPS forum traffic).
The chart above shows 18 months of search engine traffic to DPS. I can’t go back any further than this because I wasn’t using Google Analytics before January 2007 – but the if you imagine the line goes back on the same trajectory for a further 8 or so months you’ll have a fairly accurate graph in your mind.
The reason that I sent this chart was to highlight the gradual and steady growth of search engine traffic to the blog.
Apart from two spikes in traffic (can anyone guess what they were for?) the traffic growth has been incredibly steady and fairly predictable.
While some SEO types will promise you overnight traffic from Google if you let them build links for you – my experience of search engine traffic on quality blogs has been much more along the lines of what you see illustrated here.
Don’t Get Frustrated – Look at the Big Picture
It is easy to look at statistics of a blog and grow frustrated. For example lets look at my Search Engine Traffic to the DPS blog for the month of January this year:
Doesn’t look like much improvement (if any) does there? The fact is that when I do a ‘monthly view’ of any month since I started the graph always looks much the same – small rises and falls – but none of them seem to show much growth.
However when you look at them over time the trend is a gradual growth.
Why does Search Engine Traffic grow so steadily over time?
There are two main factors that contribute to the stead growth in search engine traffic that you see illustrated here:
1. Steady Addition of Content – every day I add a new post to DPS. This means that the archives are slowly growing over time with each post being a new potential pages for people to find when they search Google. There are currently just over 600 posts on the blog – if you were to chart their addition to the blog I suspect it’d be a very similar graph to the one you see above.
2. Gradual Growth in Incoming Links – over time DPS has gradually grown in it’s profile and popularity with other bloggers. While there are some posts that attract more incoming links than others – the growth in external links pointing at the blog has been something that has happened steadily over time. As a result the blog has growth in authority in the eyes of Google.
Other factors are also no doubt at play. The age of the domain, the interlinking of posts (internal links count for link building too), improvements in SEO etc all have played a part in the growth of search engine traffic. However it is interesting to note that despite me making a variety of SEO tweaks along the way that none of them have brought a marked increase in traffic to the blog.
While there’s a lot of strategies that you can employ to grow search engine traffic to your blog – the take home lesson is to keep adding quality content (the kind that people will want to share with others) to your blog. If you do this steadily over time you put yourself in a position to capitalize on that work.
Hey great post Darren. It certainly helps a person to keep the faith a bit for sure. I guess a person could kind of look at it as “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Things like that take time. I’ve certainly noticed a big increase in my traffic over time, and as it grows I’m quite sure it will get to that point some day. Your always an inspiration to me, and thanx for reminding us of the big picture every once in a while.
Cheers
Davin
So in this case, what type of search engine submission did you use early on? Looking at your google analytics it says ‘search engines’, not just Google I assume. I’m currently in a situation where I used Rage Sitemap Autumator to create sitemaps for Google, Yahoo, and MSN(?), but I haven’t been submitted yet. Good article, glad to know search engines are gradual and linear increases for those who put up quality posts.
I’ve been blogging for about 19 months and have seen fairly steady growth. It’s not that hard to get a lot of traffic from search engines, write good content, often. There are no cutting corners, sometimes you may get lucky but usually steady growth is always the case.
thanks for posting this. it’s hard to keep the faith after traffic goes up a bit, it also goes down. looking at the bigger picture helps a lot, something I keep forgetting to do.
actually, i was really clueless about seo, and finally i started with the seo pulgins on wordpress and tagging my images. duh… who knew that would help?
;)
Great post. Those are some impressive stats over time. That is the exact same thing I am seeing on my blog, and you are completely right about the month to month stats.
The gradual content additions are what drives most of the increased traffic.
The great thing about steady, gradual growth is that it is long lasting…unlike spikes.
Thats a very good point. SE traffic isn’t instant. You don’t get it overnight. This is the same with most traffic actually (minus random social media traffic).
You have to build your network around your blog to increase your traffic. As the number of links come in so does the traffic from search engines.
Great post.
100% correct. The one thing that everybody can do no matter what their knowledge of seo is:
Post a lot of good quality content. Over time it will take care of all of your problems.
The Masked Millionaire
This gives me some hope.:) Thank you for a great post!
What is the influence of images via google image search?
SE traffic really is a nice thing, the more your blog grows the more you end up getting. It comes pretty much hand in hand. It’s especially great for not having the old content end up useless and never to be seen again, still on a daily basis there’s people finding their way to them through mainly search engines.
Great stats there Darren :)
I agree that addition of new and unique content regularly would help a lot in getting SE traffic.
But would it help you if you are in a niche with thousands of competitors adding unique content regularly? I am experiencing that with one of my blogs.
It has loads of unique content, all indexed but not good in SERPs.
Can you explain a bit about that?
Great post Darren! I just started at my new company Roost about three weeks ago and one of my duties is to manage the corporate blog. It is frustrating to start from ground zero but I am encouraged by your information. We are trying to put up quality content on a daily basis and after about a month, we are already seeing some of the benefits of our labor. Thanks again.
Derek Overbey
Sr. Director of Partnership Strategy
Roost.com
http://www.roost.com
http://blog.roost.com
Excellent post – and the perfect message for all of us!
We can’t expect traffic to increase overnight. The increase has to be gradual if it is to be sustained.
I still remember when I got my first visitor from Google – boy, was I excited! Now, after about 6 months, I get around 225 uniques from Google every day.
And the graph for my site looks identical to Darren’s graph – of course, with much smaller numbers :-)
BTW, does anyone know why traffic dips every Saturday and Sunday? Do people use internet less in the weekends?? Or people prefer surfing during work hours?? ;-)
Too many people want to rush results, when real long-term success actually comes from long-term SEO growth
Sound advice, but it makes sense! Strong content, links and so on. Offer people something of value! Connect with the right people, don’t try to be the know it all because none of “us” knows everything on any particular topic.
I’m not afraid to cite other sites that have great resources or ideas; we belong to a community and when you bring value into that community, guess what?
– People link to you
– opportunities come
– friendship are established
– you grow as a person and blogger
– of course, traffic to your site will increase
– What else?
Be encouraged people! Some principles in blogging apply to health and fitness.
– takes time, overnight success is a joke!
– must remain consistent
– don’t live of yesterdays achievements
– requires support/partners
– constantly changing- fresh content
– NO shortcuts
– What else?
The one month, relatively flat chart hit home for me. My Analytics account defaults a one month view and I frequently discouraged when I see a flat line. However, if I reach back the beginning I get motivated because I can see growth.
I also agree the number one way to increase SE traffic is to simply post regular content. A blogger who posts every single day will add 365 articles to be indexed by Google. A few of those will be big hits, but even the smaller ones add up over time.
Great post Darren. In analytics I usually compare my graphs to previous months just so I can see a difference without getting frustrated.
If I remember, you did a contest asking people which page on Pro Blogger got the most Google Traffic, and I believe it was “About Me”.
That may account for that big spike in the middle :p
This can be true, but there are certainly niches which will allow you to see spikes in SEO traffic. Even sustainable spikes. For example, I posted a nice post about watching the Tour de France online and I’ve seen a major spike in search engine traffic that will certainly last the rest of the month. Granted it’s cyclical due to the nature of the event. However, each year I’ll get the spike for the Tour de France.
I definitely think, at least for my blog, that it’s all the posts that get me so much google traffic. Every week I post a handful of choice articles, and in that week I see a (small) spike in traffic. Some posts are more searched than others, but I like that I’m getting so much traffic to them.
Great post and I believe NO shortcut to be success blog.
So first rule is….have faith on our blog.
Sound piece of advice and up to now, Google is still the number one source of my traffic. All this despite the PR penalties they slapped me with, the Big G still sends me a lot of traffic.
I am currently very disappointed with the amount of search engine traffic my blog gets, but I will take your advice and just keep adding quality content. :)
6000 – 8000 unique visitors a day from google? Can someone say, BOOM – SHACKA – LACKA!
Darren, another great piece of writting… however can you write a more detailed one as to how smaller blogs that are just starting out like mine can reach a plateau of lets say 10,000 unique visitors a month?
Wow that traffic from SE looks like magnet % on work! Every month almost same up %, looking great!
Absolutely Darren.
I would love to have one of my search traffic screenshots sent in. But it doesnt have much to offer, for a blog only four months old. It was sticking around zero or two visitors a day, and now gets around a hundred a day. But I guess its fairly new to estimate now. Perhaps in a year’s time, it will have more than thousand a day (or so I hope) But these are search engine figures, right? What about hte actual daily traffic from direct visitors and referrals? There must be thousands of referral sites for you by now, that may refer quite an amount of traffic
Lenin
Hey Darren,
Awesome post! Confirms what I had originally thought I should do in relationship to my blog. Although I do need to begin a daily posting routine (I post 2-3 times a week now), it seems I was on the right track.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Again, awesome post, Darren.
Peace.
Yea this gives me hope as i currently receive around say 0 hits a day from search engines. With only 6 blog posts so far i am not too worried.
I know exactly what you mean about looking at an individual moth and it appears to go up and down but always looks even, with little progression.
But when you step back, look at a longer period you really notice how well you are doing.
The Geared Investor – in the early days I didn’t really do any submissions to search engines. I find that if you write content that gets linked to that that is the quickest way to get indexed in Google as their bots follow links. I didn’t even do sitemaps :-)
William – I don’t actually get a lot of Google image traffic – this surprises me a little as I have so many images on the site. The only explanation that I have is that perhaps people are not using google to search for the type of pictures I have. Perhaps if I had a post with ’10 britney spears’ images I’d get more of that type of traffic :-)
Chetan – yes competition plays a part, although the photography site space is very crowded. In that case you need to really work not only on content but developing relationships with other sites and finding ways to get them to link to you. That’s what will lift you above the rest.
Raag – in general most sites dip on weekends as less people are surfing then. This of course is different if your site is about football or some other weekend focused topic.
Alex – yes I do that too – comparing one month to the previous with an overlay/comparison chart is great to show how you’ve improved.
Bamboo Forest – LOL
StocksHaven – I’ve got a few posts in the works on building readership that should help.
Lenin – yes these are just SE figures. If you add in other site referrals as well as direct traffic from RSS and my newsletters the graph doesn’t look anywhere near as smooth. There is spikes all over the place – particularly from social media traffic.
Yes, serious traffic…
Wow… PERIOD. Count me inspired.
No- really… INSPIRED.
Excellent post. keep on posting good and quality content, other bloggers will link that post. This will help you to increase google PR rank
Awesome traffic your blog is getting. Very mature and good tips. thanks.
thanks for the article Darren
It has made me feel a little more motivated to just keep perservering….Although I admit, I do enjoy writing posts it feels a little bit disconcerting at times when my traffic reports aren’t too high…
I guess its all comes back to that old folk story- slow and steady always win the race…
suits me just fine !
jess
I agree with the poster who said long term is better. No one makes it overnight apart from search engine spammers and black hats.
Write good posts and try and add value is the way forward!
Darren, thanks for pointing out there are no secret recipes or quick fixes. This is a point often lost on poeple trying to make a big splansh over night.
Content is king with search engines and while you can find some quick fixes to traffic, like advertising, you still need good content to make it stick.
Darren, thanks for pointing out there are no secret recipes or quick fixes. This is a point often lost on poeple trying to make a big splash over night.
Content is king with search engines and while you can find some quick fixes to traffic, like advertising, you still need good content to make it stick.
Cool.. that’s a heck of a lot of search engine traffic. I have noticed my search engine traffic has went up really high in the last month. at the beginning of June I was getting around 190 to 200 visits a day from search engines. through out the month of June and the beginning of this month the blog rise to about 450 visits a day. is weird, because I haven’t done anything special. I;m not complaining about anything, but it seems weird to me.
Each post you make on a blog is like buying another house. You own more real estate. Great post. Thanks for showing that graph.
Great information, there is so much conflicting information out there on what SEO can do for you, I agree there is no ‘cheating’ ranking, only good content and time will get the traffic pumping !
Darren,
Great post, shows you what determination can do for you.
Tanny
Internet Home Business Ideas
This is a great post. We’ve got about 130 posts now on our site so it is still pretty young, but we have noticed a steady increase over the last 7 months. We went from about 20 visits a day to now about 200. Still not that much though, but an increase non the less. As far a search engines go, we don’t get much. It’s mostly from referring sites. I use the SEO plugin in wordpress and google site map, but feel like I’m missing something.
The lesson here can be summed up in one word:
Patience
thanks for giving out this info..i love your blog..it’s very informative blog..i learn alot from you Darren !!
I hope i can success like you in future too..
With that kind of traffic and if only 1% of them click the ads you could generate about 120 clicks everyday!! Wow.. that’s a lot of revenue.
Thanks for sharing this, it really builds up my spirit.. :)
This is a long lost relative in the states. We communicated a few years ago. My husband and I have a medical uniform business now and a website designed by my oldest step-son. I have been blogging on our site about uniforms…not as much as I should, but it is effective. I blogged quite a bit about Iguanamed medical scrubs and we have been on page 1 or 2 of google for that brand for some time now. Always enjoy getting emails from a Rowse! Thanks.
This is probably the best, common sense article I have read on SEO. Thanks for the help!
Really useful, no nonsense info. It’s always difficult to explain to clients that there results/ranking will not go up over time.
Cheers
Great post? Ah – no.
You told me nothing of how the whole search engine thing works! Do I need to use tags on my posts to help with searches? Do they search the title or the actual content? What are certain words/phrases that are highly popular and can help to drive traffic thru searching? How about submitting your sites and promoting to search engines?
This was nothing more than a study of YOUR analytics. And as impressed as I am with your huge numbers…that doesn’t really help me out now does it?