Feb 2016 Update: 10,000 monthly visitors achieved!

Google search analytics for Dec15-Jan16 vs Nov15-Dec15

Monthly visitors improved from 5,951 to 12,404!

This month's increment is mostly from a single article, where it accounted for almost 5,000 views out of the 12,000 visitors.

Lets review the goals I've set last month:

• Reach 140 posts (last update = 110 posts)
  • Failed. Current: 128 posts (+18 from last month). I fall short of my target because I didn't account for Chinese New Year which I celebrated for almost a week. Not smart. Since I'll be overseas for 1 week at the beginning of March, I set the next target at 145 posts.
  • Target by next update: 145 posts.
    

• Improve average ranking to 10.0 (last update = 17.0)
  • Failed. Current average ranking: 14.2 (+2.8 from last month)
  • Target by next update: 12.0 average ranking.
    • Improvement in overall ranking gets harder as we are getting closer to top 10. My goal is still to get my overall site ranking into first page of Google (i.e. the average ranking for all search queries that shows my website on Google lands in the first page of search results).
      
• CTR saw a minor improvement from 7.6% to 8.27% (+0.67%). I expect to see better CTR as my site's overall ranking improves. Higher ranking means better visibility, and better click through rate.

Since the data presented here are only for Google search, they did not account for referral traffic. I've been trying to build some links here and there, which contributed to around 3,000 views for the last month.

This brings the total number of visitors to my site at 15,703 from 5 Jan to 4 Feb 2016.

However, since most of us are getting visitors from Google search, I'll continue to focus the next updates on traffic from the search engine.

As I've said earlier, I'm not confident the growth will continue for the coming month because the number of search for my main search term has decreased over the month. I am seeing a decline in the number of visitors to my site, too.

As long as my site's overall ranking and CTR is still in good shape, I'm OK with decreased visitors. There are many factors affecting the number of people searching for a particular term, and it's out of my control. So I wouldn't think too much about it.

With that said, I expect the next update to report a lower number compared to this. But I'm gonna take this as a challenge to write more useful articles and rank for more keywords. The more keywords I rank for, the more chances there is to get visitors to my site.

I would rather rank for 100 keywords that give me 10 daily visitors than 1 keyword that gives me 1,000 visitors a day. It's just too risky to put all the eggs into a single basket.

My advise to those who are just starting out is still the same - go through the training courses in WA and focus on building your site. Don't lose your focus, and try to make your site as genuinely helpful as possible.

There will be people who read your stuff and appreciate it.