Wondering When This Train Will Start Picking Up Speed. Instead of Backing Up Slowly. :
Hey everyone,
So I'm about 4.5 months in, and trucking along on my website www.kidslovedressup.com. I'm determined to make this work, especially after putting so much time and energy into it (and money... between the domain registration, 3 months individual, and then a yearly... around $635CDN.)
I'm still enjoying it, but I've got to say, I'm getting a bit worried because my rankings just aren't really climbing. They are actually sort of dropping, if anything. Organic traffic is very slow. Like, maybe 5 a day lately. (I expected a slow-down after Christmas, but it's more than I thought it would be.)
I'm at 51 posts, and I've done my keyword research. They are good low competition (less than 100QSR for the most part), long tailed keywords. My posts are lengthy (over 1000 words), have lots of pictures, and I think, are easy reads. I have a mix of individual product reviews, product recommendations/what's available pages, and all-about-dress-up pages.
I've done some "testing" and pumped up some posts that were on page 2 or 3 with a bunch of new comments from the lovely WA community, but those exact posts started dropping in the ranks instead of climbing! Another weird thing is that the posts themselves stop ranking, and the tag that is the most similar begins ranking in it's place. Strange!!
I guess I'm just writing to express a bit of frustration and worry - did any of you go through a similar period? Does this sound "normal" for this point for a non-problem-solving niche?
The only things I can think of are a) I may have too many links to Amazon on some of them (not sure how to get around that as the point of the posts is to highlight the variety of dress up gear available under a particular theme, ie, "superhero dress up for girls"). Or b) my competition is just "too strong" - there are too many established e-commerce sites like Amazon, Walmart, Sears, Target, HalloweenSuperstores etc., that will always come up first. (I've tried to get away from item-specific keywords, but it still comes up.)
Anyone have any advice? Do I just stick it out and see where things are at 6 months? Or do I need to do some re-vamping...?
Thanks for reading, everyone, and I appreciate your feedback.
Recent Comments
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3 months is usually around the point where you will start to see rankings and some further penetration in Google. How much traffic are you getting and which pages on your site are you getting the most traffic to?
Are you getting comments and engagement on every page post? Are you posting at least 2-3 times per week?
This could be based on the keyword selection and just a time thing. If you are getting some traffic and have some good rankings, I would say you are absolutely heading in the right direction here.
If you want to share some further insights into things that you have done, that would be great.
Thanks Kyle,
Around 3 months I started to see things move a bit... I started getting more regular sales too. I DO realize my niche definitely is a popular one for Christmas gifts though, and that afterwards things would slow a bit. But this much?
According to Google Analytics, from Jan 1-13:
163 sessions (78 direct, 36 organic, 35 referral, 14 social)
Most popular pages in that time period, in this order:
- https://kidslovedressup.com/princess-dresses-for-little-girls-10-seriously-adorable-best-sellers
- https://kidslovedressup.com/activities-for-4-year-olds-that-they-can-do-on-their-own
- home page (whatever page is the / ;)
- https://kidslovedressup.com/the-melissa-and-doug-doctor-role-play-costume-set-review
- https://kidslovedressup.com/the-melissa-and-doug-doctor-role-play-costume-set-review
Unfortunately these are simply just the last few posts I've done - and I'm assuming the traffic comes from WA due to my efforts in the comments area, to be honest.
I use serplab.co.uk (basing it on google.com) to check my rankings, and out of my 51 keywords so far, as of today I have:
1 on page 1, 6 on page 2, 13 on page 3, 8 on page 4... etc. A total of 34 in the Top 100. This has been about the same for the last 2-3 weeks.
I average 2 - maybe 3 - new posts per week. After I write a new post, I head over to the give & take thread (or the sitecomments area, depending), and pump up the latest post, or a post that needs some bumping up in the ranks with some comments.
I have only one post that has no comments - one I wrote about that is a Halloween topic, so I'm letting that one percolate until later in the year.
For each post, I also write a meta tag and meta description, add tags, create a pinterest blog pin and pin it (and other images) to my pinterest boards, add it to my menus, add the link on my home page, and try to link to it on another of my earlier posts where applicable.
Does this help?
Thanks! I appreciate any feedback!
Marlaine
The first thing you should stop doing is writing "meta" tags for your posts, that can really hurt rankings. Instead, you should let the All in One SEO tool do it's thing, your meta title should reflect your title of your post EXACTLY and your description should be pulled from the content.
If there is discrepancy there, that can impact your rankings as it would seem strange to google that they differ.
Next, your engagement is quite good but you might want to consider using the SiteComments platform to boost certain existing articles and also with new content as you create it.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/websites/comments
Versus the give and take thread. This platform is much better and everyone that adds a comment will have an image, which will lead to a much more trustworthy and real feeling conversations.
Your site is in a good state and now is the time to push forward because as time goes on here, your site is going to gain more and more authority in Google and other search engines and you are going to see new posts strike higher in the results and older posts start to move up the results.
Thanks Kyle. I appreciate the advice.
Do you recommend that I go in and remove all of the tags, meta titles, and meta descriptions for all of my posts?