Written on July 10th, 2008 at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse
How to Grow Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog
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.
58 Responses to “How to Grow Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog”
Davin-Viral Marketing Strategist
July 10th, 2008 12:14 am
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
The Geared Investor
July 10th, 2008 12:14 am
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.
Michael
July 10th, 2008 12:15 am
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.
lady coveted
July 10th, 2008 12:25 am
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?
;)
Robb Sutton (198)
July 10th, 2008 12:25 am
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.
devjargon
July 10th, 2008 12:48 am
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.
The Masked Millionaire
July 10th, 2008 12:48 am
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
1HappyBlogger
July 10th, 2008 12:53 am
This gives me some hope.:) Thank you for a great post!
William Lehman
July 10th, 2008 12:55 am
What is the influence of images via google image search?
Slevi
July 10th, 2008 12:58 am
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.
Chetan
July 10th, 2008 12:59 am
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?
Derek Overbey
July 10th, 2008 1:02 am
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
Raag Vamdatt
July 10th, 2008 1:07 am
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?? ;-)
Todd Andrews
July 10th, 2008 1:08 am
Too many people want to rush results, when real long-term success actually comes from long-term SEO growth
Miguel Wickert
July 10th, 2008 1:11 am
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?
Frugal Dad
July 10th, 2008 1:21 am
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.
Alex the Freelance Twin
July 10th, 2008 1:26 am
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
John Lynn
July 10th, 2008 1:50 am
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.
Trisha
July 10th, 2008 2:26 am
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.
dee yan
July 10th, 2008 2:55 am
Great post and I believe NO shortcut to be success blog.
So first rule is….have faith on our blog.
jhay
July 10th, 2008 3:06 am
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.
Rajaie AlKorani
July 10th, 2008 4:24 am
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. :)
Bamboo Forest
July 10th, 2008 4:36 am
6000 - 8000 unique visitors a day from google? Can someone say, BOOM - SHACKA - LACKA!
www.StocksHaven.com
July 10th, 2008 5:10 am
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?
Make Money Talks
July 10th, 2008 5:27 am
Wow that traffic from SE looks like magnet % on work! Every month almost same up %, looking great!
Lenin Nair
July 10th, 2008 5:48 am
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
Michael
July 10th, 2008 7:02 am
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.
Dale
July 10th, 2008 8:07 am
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.
GrantMc
July 10th, 2008 9:20 am
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.
Darren Rowse
July 10th, 2008 9:33 am
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.
Ilaarijs
July 10th, 2008 12:09 pm
Yes, serious traffic…
Financial Nut
July 10th, 2008 12:58 pm
Wow… PERIOD. Count me inspired.
No- really… INSPIRED.
A Suresh Kumar
July 10th, 2008 1:59 pm
Excellent post. keep on posting good and quality content, other bloggers will link that post. This will help you to increase google PR rank
Sachin
July 10th, 2008 3:15 pm
Awesome traffic your blog is getting. Very mature and good tips. thanks.
Jess
July 10th, 2008 6:40 pm
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
Working Nomad
July 10th, 2008 9:18 pm
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!
Marc Rohde
July 10th, 2008 11:31 pm
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.
Marc Rohde
July 10th, 2008 11:31 pm
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.
Nelson
July 11th, 2008 7:36 am
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.
Mike
July 11th, 2008 11:53 am
Each post you make on a blog is like buying another house. You own more real estate. Great post. Thanks for showing that graph.
Ian
July 12th, 2008 8:39 am
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 !
Internet Business Ideas
July 12th, 2008 11:54 pm
Darren,
Great post, shows you what determination can do for you.
Tanny
Internet Home Business Ideas
Bob
July 13th, 2008 7:41 am
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.
Chad Bordeaux
July 13th, 2008 8:37 am
The lesson here can be summed up in one word:
Patience
Mak$ Mon$y Onlin$
July 13th, 2008 10:32 pm
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..
handy
July 14th, 2008 11:15 am
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.. :)
Judith Rowse Demick
July 15th, 2008 6:15 am
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.
Tucson Bass Player
July 21st, 2008 2:19 pm
This is probably the best, common sense article I have read on SEO. Thanks for the help!
Zander Martineau
July 25th, 2008 6:22 pm
Really useful, no nonsense info. It’s always difficult to explain to clients that there results/ranking will not go up over time.
Cheers
Marcy Massura-The Glamorous Life
August 3rd, 2008 8:34 am
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?
ANT
August 4th, 2008 12:42 pm
Great info…and Rome wasn’t built in a day. I sometimes get frustrated when I look at the chart and graphics. I really don’t know why I’m trying to build traffic to my site…I don’t sell anything..yet I am compelled to keep doing it. Any suggestions?
http://www.antcomic.com
ANT
Lance
August 12th, 2008 2:52 am
Thanks for the post. Just goes to show that the old adage still applies: “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Thanks again.
Lance
http://www.homeeducateinthesunshinestate.com/blog/
Pat
September 18th, 2008 3:26 pm
Hi and thank you for the very inspirational post. It gives me some hope for the future! I’ll just keep writing content and cranking away.
Thank you!
Clint Says
October 8th, 2008 2:23 am
Thanks for the post. The road to building a successful blog is not unlike every other endeavor in life. Hard work and a continual effort.
Aces
October 14th, 2008 5:24 pm
I am giving away an iPhone and $500 on my blog to get visitors.
Miguel Wickert
October 15th, 2008 12:12 am
@ ACES WOW, well that sure is a way to get visitors to your site. I completely agree with Clint, “hard work and a continual effort.
Mediterranean Diet
October 29th, 2008 6:00 am
This is the most honest, realistic and simple information about search engine traffic I have ever read. It has been writen in a very pedagogic way, very well built and ilustrated.
Some may not accept it but this is the real truth.
Scott
December 11th, 2008 1:27 pm
Darren,
Thanks for the encouragement. My site is also growing slowly.
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