New Website Advice - Impressions Not Rising

[Flea Market SEO]

Hey everyone.

We started a new website in February of this year. It was a new domain with zero backlinks (never registered previously). We built the site on Wordpress and to date have published over 50 long form articles (~2250 words per article). I've been fairly selective with keyword research and have gone after low competition keywords (KD<5 using AHREFS...most less than 3).

We've gone completely White Hat and haven't done any guest posts, purchased links, etc.. I've created a LinkedIn profile for the website and also have links on each of our personal profiles. We have active social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

To date, we have virtually ZERO traffic. I would be ok if the impressions were starting to rise, but we're averaging 3-5 impressions per day and have been for months.

*I should add that all of our content is original content and it's written (well) by native English speakers.

Thoughts?

 

[Topiano]

You've been following incomeschool practices.

Either you wait little longer or start building links to your root URL and other target pages. You need to go greyhat. Hardly would anyone link back to you without a means of renumeration.

Also, Ahrefs <5 in KD doesn't make the keywords low comp. There are further digs needed underground..

 

[Rashad Hossain]

Can we see the website? I would spam pinterest for easy traffic or comment on reddit/forums.

 

[Flea Market SEO]

Can we see the website? I would spam pinterest for easy traffic or comment on reddit/forums.

I'd rather not divulge the site on BHW. What are some tools to SPAM Pinterest for traffic? I've never had much success with it. I have another website that has a Pinterest page with more than 10k followers and 6500 active engagement...I might get 15 visitors a month to our site.

 

[Flea Market SEO]

You've been following incomeschool practices.

Either you wait little longer or start building links to your root URL and other target pages. You need to go greyhat. Hardly would anyone link back to you without a means of renumeration.

Also, Ahrefs <5 in KD doesn't make the keywords low comp. There are further digs needed underground..

Yes, I'm familiar with Income School...I'm open to gray hat, but not sure where to start with link building. My other website is an e-commerce store, so we just sent products everywhere and got a bunch of reviews...now, we're more of a tips/reviews/blog style site.

 

[3bisu]

Yes, I'm familiar with Income School...I'm open to gray hat, but not sure where to start with link building. My other website is an e-commerce store, so we just sent products everywhere and got a bunch of reviews...now, we're more of a tips/reviews/blog style site.

I have a website in the same situation as yours, you can keep publishing until google will show some love but there is no timeframe or you can start building links. Start slow, point some backlink to your homepage at first, keep consistent

 

[Dinner&Diatribes]

First question might be a dumb one and extremely obvious, but is your site even crawlable? Check your robots.txt and make sure nothing's being disallowed, and make sure you have the button unchecked in the Settings>General area that discourages search engines from crawling the site. Finally, check to make sure you don't have any tags in your header that say noindex, nofollow.

Check GSC to see if somehow the domain has a penalty (Manual Actions tab), and keep checking the Performance tab for impressions. Are you saying in GSC you only get 3-5 impressions per day? That can't be right especially if you have that much content and it's been this long unless you have a penalty or something...

If you don't have a penalty, I would ask how your onpage SEO is: do you have the keyword in the title tag/h1 of the article? Are the articles formatted correctly? Also, are there technical issues hindering your site's performance? Use SEMrush's technical audit or screaming frog to scan the site to make sure there's no duplicate metadata issues, and you can use Siteliner to check for duplicate content. Finally, do you have an about page, contact page, terms of service & privacy policy pages?

If all of that is fine and you don't see any issues, you should start building foundational links and buy some social signals. I've used this guy for the foundational links: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/b...em-reputation-management-starts-at-6.1017464/ and there are plenty of guys on here that can get you social signals. Also, I'd even look into doing a few blog comments every day, especially on sites within your niche, to help build trust.

Aaand just keep pumping out great, long-form content in your niche. You'll eventually get picked up by the Google Gods if you have all of the previous stuff in place.

 

[Backlink Database]

What's the niche?

Chances are you lack backlinks to said pages.

I'll skip the niche edits & guest post, they often are paid for & hosting other paid links (Gambling, adult etc)

I can send you a few campaigns by million dollar companies that will work for your niche/site.

All you have to do is copy and tweak a bit for them to work.

 

[Flea Market SEO]

What's the niche?

Chances are you lack backlinks to said pages.

I'll skip the niche edits & guest post, they often are paid for & hosting other paid links (Gambling, adult etc)

I can send you a few campaigns by million dollar companies that will work for your niche/site.

All you have to do is copy and tweak a bit for them to work.

Niche is Travel. That's another that's killed us is COVID-19. I'm open to reviewing anything at this point.

 

[Backlink Database]

Niche is Travel. That's another that's killed us is COVID-19. I'm open to reviewing anything at this point.

I'm building a new one in travel too.
I scraped close to 50-60+ campaigns to copy/do at this point.

It's a hard niche to start with bc of saturation, so you need a differentiation/angle to it.

A short domain name/1 word domain name, branding or some title/award you can talk about will help in getting more links.

Travel will come back, just work towards that - the bounce back will be bigger than ever since everything will be on sale. Good angle to hit:

Be the travel guy looking out for the best COVID reopening deals.

What's your current monetisation model?

 

[Chris Tzitzis]

Without seeing your site just gonna make the bold prediction of ... you need backlinks! This is good example of the 'content is king' mantra falling straight on its face.

You'll most likely want to go grey hat like some others have mentioned. You can def do it all white hat but the time tradeoff is very significant.

 

[xMnkx]

Lol do you think that KD from Ahrefs is reliable? Hahaha. I use semrush + Moz + google keyword planner + KGR method. Bro Ahrefs just take into account the backlinks

 

[Flea Market SEO]

First question might be a dumb one and extremely obvious, but is your site even crawlable? Check your robots.txt and make sure nothing's being disallowed, and make sure you have the button unchecked in the Settings>General area that discourages search engines from crawling the site. Finally, check to make sure you don't have any tags in your header that say noindex, nofollow.

Check GSC to see if somehow the domain has a penalty (Manual Actions tab), and keep checking the Performance tab for impressions. Are you saying in GSC you only get 3-5 impressions per day? That can't be right especially if you have that much content and it's been this long unless you have a penalty or something...

If you don't have a penalty, I would ask how your onpage SEO is: do you have the keyword in the title tag/h1 of the article? Are the articles formatted correctly? Also, are there technical issues hindering your site's performance? Use SEMrush's technical audit or screaming frog to scan the site to make sure there's no duplicate metadata issues, and you can use Siteliner to check for duplicate content. Finally, do you have an about page, contact page, terms of service & privacy policy pages?

If all of that is fine and you don't see any issues, you should start building foundational links and buy some social signals. I've used this guy for the foundational links: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/b...em-reputation-management-starts-at-6.1017464/ and there are plenty of guys on here that can get you social signals. Also, I'd even look into doing a few blog comments every day, especially on sites within your niche, to help build trust.

Aaand just keep pumping out great, long-form content in your niche. You'll eventually get picked up by the Google Gods if you have all of the previous stuff in place.

All of our pages are indexed on Google. When I type site:mydomain.com - everything is there.

Correct, we have ~60 solid pieces of content and are getting 3-5 impressions per day. I will admit we're in the travel niche, but it's not "global travel" or anything like that.

There are no manual penalties.

My on page seo appears to be on point. My main keyword is in the Title/H1 tag, then others heading takes contain LSI keywords. That said, everything is written naturally and not to appease the search engines. I typically let it marinate, then go back to adjust where needed.

All that said...I don't have ANYTHING to adjust at this point. We've gotten 11 clicks in the last 28 days.

Regarding the technical side, my page load speed could be better, but we're sitting at ~90 for Desktop and 65-75 for Mobile. Surely that wouldn't affect the impressions to the extent that I'm seeing?? I will run it through SemRush to see if there's anything glaring, but I know that none of our content is duplicate because I've checked everything through multiple plagiarism checkers before publishing.

I do not have a Privacy Policy or About Us Page, I guess we can jump on that.

 

[Flea Market SEO]

Lol do you think that KD from Ahrefs is reliable? Hahaha. I use semrush + Moz + google keyword planner + KGR method. Bro Ahrefs just take into account the backlinks

I should clarify. I have MULTIPLE strategies to pick keywords:

I do utilize KGR, but it can be somewhat misleading IMO
I do a lot of competitor analysis for those competitors in a similar spot to our website
Google Suggestions

*I don't really ever "start" with AHREFS, but I do look at it when I'm not seeing any movement in a keyword.

 

[xMnkx]

I should clarify. I have MULTIPLE strategies to pick keywords:

I do utilize KGR, but it can be somewhat misleading IMO
I do a lot of competitor analysis for those competitors in a similar spot to our website
Google Suggestions

*I don't really ever "start" with AHREFS, but I do look at it when I'm not seeing any movement in a keyword.

Thanks for clarifying. So you should build high quality links

 

[Amphoric]

Hey everyone.

We started a new website in February of this year. It was a new domain with zero backlinks (never registered previously). We built the site on Wordpress and to date have published over 50 long form articles (~2250 words per article). I've been fairly selective with keyword research and have gone after low competition keywords (KD<5 using AHREFS...most less than 3).

We've gone completely White Hat and haven't done any guest posts, purchased links, etc.. I've created a LinkedIn profile for the website and also have links on each of our personal profiles. We have active social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

To date, we have virtually ZERO traffic. I would be ok if the impressions were starting to rise, but we're averaging 3-5 impressions per day and have been for months.

*I should add that all of our content is original content and it's written (well) by native English speakers.

Thoughts?

For the keywords that you are trying to rank, have you searched user intent?

Search the keyword in google and see what the top 10 pages are. Do they match what's in your content? Let's say most of the top 10 ranking pages are listed reviews of like the top x products and you make a random post about said product, it likely won't cut it.

Are your pages properly optimized for SEO?

 

[Flea Market SEO]

For the keywords that you are trying to rank, have you searched user intent?

Search the keyword in google and see what the top 10 pages are. Do they match what's in your content? Let's say most of the top 10 ranking pages are listed reviews of like the top x products and you make a random post about said product, it likely won't cut it.

Are your pages properly optimized for SEO?

Yes, I understand user intent. We typically try to add value to what's already existing, or take a slightly unique angle on it. i.e., if someone says the "top 10 ways to ____" we might say "top 15 ways to ____" - or say "top 15 ways to ____ or ____"

 

[Amphoric]

Yes, I understand user intent. We typically try to add value to what's already existing, or take a slightly unique angle on it. i.e., if someone says the "top 10 ways to ____" we might say "top 15 ways to ____" - or say "top 15 ways to ____ or ____"

Is your word count averaged out at least? Let's say the top 10 posts are like 1000 to 1500 and you have a 3000 worded post, which could also be a factor. (just an example - I think you mentioned something like 2000~ words are usually your lengths)


Don't forget - Your site is like what 5 months old? Might take a bit longer for Google to "trust" your content. It took about 6-8 months for my site to start getting anything.

 

[Flea Market SEO]

Is your word count averaged out at least? Let's say the top 10 posts are like 1000 to 1500 and you have a 3000 worded post, which could also be a factor. (just an example - I think you mentioned something like 2000~ words are usually your lengths)


Don't forget - Your site is like what 5 months old? Might take a bit longer for Google to "trust" your content. It took about 6-8 months for my site to start getting anything.

Yes, we use SurferSEO and SEOQuake to get word count. All of our posts are within 5-10% of the average...most are on the higher side of 10-15% (than the average).

 

[Amphoric]

If your stuff is optimized like you mentioned, being in the travel niche and this whole pandemic thing will take a hit on your possible rankings.

Others have recommended getting some backlinks, have you built any yourself? It might help a little bit. But besides that you will likely need to wait for things to somehow go back to what they were, which will def. take some time.