Mar 2016 Update: Small bump in the road
Published on March 7, 2016
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Total number of clicks decreased from 12,404 to 7,779 in a month!
Let's go through the analysis later.
Before that, as usual, let's review the goals I've set last month:
- Reach 140 posts (last update = 128 posts)
- Success. Current number of posts = 143. (+15 from last month). I'm splitting my effort between the current website and a newly established website, so I'll cut down on the estimation on number of posts published.
- Nonetheless, I'm expecting 3 to 4 new blog posts per week.
- Target by next update: 158 posts.
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- Failed. Current record is still at 684 visitors a day.
- Target by next update: 800 daily visitors.
- Failed. Current: 7,779 monthly visitors (-4,625 from last month)
- Target by next update: 15,000 monthly visitors.
- As per my update last month, I've predicted a drop in visitors for this month. The number of queries for my main keyword has indeed dropped for quite a bit.
- Failed. Current average ranking: 16.0 (+1.8 from last update)
- Target by next update: 12.0 average ranking
- This is more alarming compared to the drop in number of visitors. There can be a few reasons that contribute to the drop of overall ranking - 1) I'm trying to rank for more competitive keywords. We'll see improvement in the coming months if I keep the website updated consistently. 2) I've had 2 weeks in the past month where I did not produce any posts at all. The idleness might have contributed to a drop in ranking.
- I'm back to a more consistent schedule this month, so we'll see if the overall ranking improves in the next update.
Now, back to the topic of decreased number of clicks. This is contributed by several number of factors:
- 20% drop in the total number of impressions. The number of impression is the number of times my website appeared in Google search engine for a particular search term. My main keyword is still ranking strong in top 3, but the number of query for the search term decreased substantially over the past month, and contributed to the lower impressions.
- Lowered CTR - many new search terms for the posts I produced last month are not ranking well. I'm tracking the ranks of all keywords weekly to see if there's a trend of improvement. So far it's 50:50 - about 50% of search terms improve and about 50% of them deteriorate. I wonder if the rankings will be more consistent when the website matures?
Course of action - As usual, the course of action is simple. I'll keep a consistent schedule for posting, aiming at 4 blog posts a week. At the same time, I'm starting another niche site for long term diversification.
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