Informer's World

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.

This morning I glanced down at the Alexa traffic indicator for ProBlogger in my Firefox browser and noticed that in the last week I’ve had a noticeable upswing in traffic to ProBlogger.
At first I couldn’t think of why this might have been. In the last 7 days none of my posts have gone viral around the web – no big site has linked up – nothing much has changed.
I clicked through to Aweber to see if the chart there was any different. It similarly showed an upswing in traffic.

Perhaps it is just one of those Aweber ‘glitches’ that happens every now and again – so I checked my site metrics and the same upswing was reflected there. Traffic was up a bit over 30% on normal over the week.
I dug down further to see which post drew in all the traffic thinking that perhaps one went viral while I slept one night and then returned to normal – but there was nothing abnormal. All of the posts in the last week had normal kind of traffic – hmmmm.
As I continued to ponder I realised that the upswing wasn’t due to any one post – it was simply due to the fact that last week I posted 13 posts instead of my normal 7-8. The increased number of posts wasn’t a strategic move – it was just that there were more stories to cover during the week with a few breaking news stories.
I guess the take home lesson is that an increase in posting frequency can lead to an increase in traffic.
Of course it isn’t quite as simple as just doubling your posts and seeing an automatic increase in traffic. A few things to keep in mind are:

• This will be more the case for a site with existing subscribers than a new one – increased numbers of posts means your subscribers are being presented with more options for things to read – increasing their chance of finding something that fits their needs.
• Of course increasing your post frequency too much and too quickly can annoy some of your subscribers. Keep in mind that when I surveyed readers on why they unsubscribe to blogs that the #1 reason given was too many posts.
• The key is to keep your posts relevant, on topic and useful. If you do want to increase your post levels you probably should also do it a little gradually. I got away with 13 posts last week instead of 8 like the week before but if I’d posted much more than that in the week I’m sure I would have got some push back from readers. Don’t suddenly decide to be like some of the big tech blogs and push out 20 posts in a day unexpectedly!