Questions about Expectations and Experiences with New SEO Websites

[L900]

Hi all,

I have a site that has been live for just over 3 months. There's about 70 articles on the site.

The posts are a mixture of low search volume, medium search volume and higher search volume. Most keywords I’ve gone after have been low competition.

Some of the posts are long, info posts designed to focus on one short tail and as many long tails as made sense for the article.

After doing some more SEO reading, I have started posting KGR posts that match up to the current level of my site. I'm planning to continue doing so and level up with KGR posts as I go along.

The long articles are ranking for a bunch of long tail keywords (mostly in positions 20+ in the serps, but a couple on page 1) and are optimized to compete with many of the KGR posts keywords.

Should I just continue posting relevant KGR content and once that starts ranking, link to other content I want to give a boost to, including the long articles and KGR articles?

Or, should I break the longer articles down into smaller KGR articles and build the basement properly first? (ie: give those articles the best chance of ranking as high as possible).

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Should I just continue posting relevant KGR content and once that starts ranking, link to other content I want to give a boost to, including the long articles and KGR articles?

Or, should I break the longer articles down into smaller KGR articles and build the basement properly first? (ie: give those articles the best chance of ranking as high as possible).

Don't break apart your current articles. Just because you aren't qualified to rank for them now doesn't mean you won't be later. It sounds to me like you structured them right with the parent short tail and then a bunch of equal-intent long tails.

You could switch to posting KGR content. But it sounds like to me you're trying to make decisions way too early. 3 months isn't enough time for Google to react to a new site and not enough time for them to give you actionable data back yet. You need to keep slamming content (low competition, could be KGR if you can find ones with enough volume) at least till month 9, I'd say, preferably 12.

The core issue is going to be whether or not you built any links in this time. Links also need to age and gain trust, and you need some page rank juice flowing through your site. You need that before you'll be getting any serious, trustworthy data from Google.

But I'd be careful about getting lost in the weeds. At this stage I wouldn't be worried about how I can optimize my workflow and keyword research and all this yet (other than focusing on low competition). I'd be trying to get out of the weeds, not find a better weed.

 

[L900]

Don't break apart your current articles. Just because you aren't qualified to rank for them now doesn't mean you won't be later. It sounds to me like you structured them right with the parent short tail and then a bunch of equal-intent long tails.

You could switch to posting KGR content. But it sounds like to me you're trying to make decisions way too early. 3 months isn't enough time for Google to react to a new site and not enough time for them to give you actionable data back yet. You need to keep slamming content (low competition, could be KGR if you can find ones with enough volume) at least till month 9, I'd say, preferably 12.

The core issue is going to be whether or not you built any links in this time. Links also need to age and gain trust, and you need some page rank juice flowing through your site. You need that before you'll be getting any serious, trustworthy data from Google.

But I'd be careful about getting lost in the weeds. At this stage I wouldn't be worried about how I can optimize my workflow and keyword research and all this yet (other than focusing on low competition). I'd be trying to get out of the weeds, not find a better weed.

Thanks for the feedback Ryuzaki.

Got it - keep slamming out the content and build some links.

Without wanting to get bogged down in unimportant things, I was wondering:

1. In the early life of a site (say if a site has been live for 3-4 months), how common is it to see fairly significant fluctuations in keyword rankings?

I understand that we shouldn’t place too much emphasis on keyword rankings early on.

But if a site was ranking on page one (in a few instances, in the top 3) in Google for a number of decent keywords (some that get a few hundred searches per month) and had been stable and ranking for these keywords for many weeks.

And then many of those rankings gradually decline over the space of a couple of weeks and slip off page 1, falling well back into the serps.

(The drop isn’t related to competitors improving their pages, or spammy backlinks or anything like that).

Some of the content here and there isn’t of the highest quality (spelling and grammar could be better, as could user experience).

Is there any cause for concern regarding the overall health of the site at this point?

Or is the answer - these fluctuations are normal, but in any event it’s too early to worry about this stuff and just keep publishing content for a few more months to get more actionable data from Google?

2. Typically, how long after alterations are made to a a post (eg: adding an image with alt tags, improving internal linking etc) do you see the impact in the serps, if any?

Is it as soon as Google crawls the page again, or is there a delay (eg: where the page might drop and then rise again)?

I understand the importance of not trying to make decisions too early, but I just want to make sure that things are tracking as they should be.


Many thanks (again) in advance for the advice.

 

[Ryuzaki]

And then many of those rankings gradually decline over the space of a couple of weeks and slip off page 1, falling well back into the serps.

Very typical. Google often gives new pages a boost so they can gather metrics to see how they perform, before sliding them back to their rightful spot.

You should also expect to not really have stable rankings at all. Pages in the top 3 can be stable, but below that it's usually chaos. SERPWoo shows this chaos. Here's the top 60 for a random keyword from my tracking list:

2. Typically, how long after alterations are made to a a post (eg: adding an image with alt tags, improving internal linking etc) do you see the impact in the serps, if any?

As soon as they crawl again usually, given that the changes aren't so drastic that they need to "re-calculate" the whole thing. When you go too far, you may end up waiting for an offline data refresh during a the next major algorithm update (6 months even). But typically with minor changes like you mentioned, you can get nearly immediate feedback, especially if you've submitted your sitemap in Search Console and have it updating the "last updated date" on the sitemap.

 

[PulseOften]

Is it normal for the average time on page for a new site (4 months) to be very low? Like under 1 minute?

Articles are informational content for ads, around 30 articles 1500 to 2500 words each. The few ones that are already ranking on the first few SERPs have an Avg. Time on Page around 3 minutes.

Just curious since I saw some YouTube videos of people showing the Avg. Time on Page time on their pages to be around 3-5 minutes. Thanks.