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.