My website is a failure - off my chest

Hello, everyone. I just wanted to get this off my chest after I've JUST NOW reviewed all my work.

I managed to pull off 110 articles that range from 2-5k words each in half a year - all by myself. I carefully selected relevant photos, analyzed carefully the content of competitors and tried to write quality content, did a few tables here and there, optimized the website for user experience, and much more. I put a lot of attention to small details. I worked my butt off.

However, I was getting seriously suspicious about my traffic. I am getting maximum of 10 unique users a day. There was just something off.

So, I went to my archives where I store all my SEO information - articles of competitors, their number of backlinks, DR/AR, traffic potential, etc. (basically just print screening ahrefs keyword explorer data). I tried to get the most out of my 7 days trial of ahrefs at that time.

Surprise surprise - the keywords that I selected were waaaay off - high domain ratings of competitors, a lot of backlinks, high difficulty of keywords, not focusing on long-tail keywords, and some of the keywords are getting absolute peanut traffic considering the fierce competition. I'm talking about like 100 visitors for the top page in Google. Yeah, rookie mistake, I know.

My SEO sucked hard. No wonder that half of my articles aren't indexed. Now my SEO skills are way better. Every article ranks pretty quickly, but the website has no real authority, though.

I have to note that this is my first 'serious' website ever. I tried to prepare myself as much as possible for the upcoming challenges by reading info on the Internet. Still, I learned everything the hard way. Nonetheless, the worst thing to do is do nothing. At least I started my IM journey.

So yeah, I don't know. I guess I'll see if I can spin the content around other low competition KW and at least get something positive out of this situation.

Feeling a little shocked and demotivated considering the amount of work that I put. I could've seen at least 20x the results that I do now if I did my SEO more correctly.

Thanks for reading!

Well it's good that you at least reassesed where you might be going wrong instead of throwing the project out of the window and giving up.
A plus point about seo is that you can go back to the drawing board, identify what can be changed and improved (as you have), make appropriate alterations and then resubmit homepage or sitemap as needed, and sometimes might literally get even overnight results!

We all make mistakes, the only thing that matters is whether you learn from your mistakes which you surely do (otherwise I wouldn't be reading this post ).

I am sure you will move ahead of this. All the best for your future endeavors

My website is a failure - off my chest​

Click to expand...

i think everyone had that moment at least once, probably multiple times during their careers.
at the end of the day, its still not a failure if you can turn things around. is your niche super hard per se? or can you find some soft keywords that more or less fit the thematic of the site? saying this because starting with a 1yo site with lots of articles can be quite different from starting from 0. i think it depends on if you can steer the site towards softer topics.

Build more links

K-One said:

Well it's good that you at least reassesed where you might be going wrong instead of throwing the project out of the window and giving up.
A plus point about seo is that you can go back to the drawing board, identify what can be changed and improved (as you have), make appropriate alterations and then resubmit homepage or sitemap as needed, and sometimes might literally get even overnight results!

Click to expand...

Thank you for encouraging words! That's what I like about seo too - it's forgiving, in a sense. We can always take a step back, re-evaluate, and align our steering wheel. It's not like a car crash that faces ultimate consequences I'll be definitely doing that.

Ashk881 said:

We all make mistakes, the only thing that matters is whether you learn from your mistakes which you surely do (otherwise I wouldn't be reading this post ).

I am sure you will move ahead of this. All the best for your future endeavors

Click to expand...

Absolutely agree with the part that you have to learn from mistakes and make the most out of them. I probably wouldn't have empathy for a person too if he would be ignorant of his mistakes. I'll try my best not to flush my work down the toilet, haha!

FriendlyPufferfish said:

i think everyone had that moment at least once, probably multiple times during their careers.
at the end of the day, its still not a failure if you can turn things around. is your niche super hard per se? or can you find some soft keywords that more or less fit the thematic of the site? saying this because starting with a 1yo site with lots of articles can be quite different from starting from 0. i think it depends on if you can steer the site towards softer topics.

Click to expand...

That's true - it's not an entire failure, it's far from it, though. The experience I've accumulated is a win itself.
My niche is kinda broad and is not caged itself. I'm pretty sure I should be able to find keywords that could fit in one or another topic. This flexibility is my strength in this scenario. Thank you for encouraging tip!

OlafRustle said:

Build more links

Click to expand...

I've just recently started focusing on it, so I'm on my way to establishing authority. Thanks!

How focused is your niche selection?

It would be better to get more details about your niche even if you don't want to reveal it exactly.

Is it a YMYL niche like health or finance? How deep did you go into a sub-niche?

Is it a niche with lots of information seeking keywords as well as buyer keywords?

You said your keywords were way off. Have you been able to find better keywords using better research?

Any tips for niche and keyword research that would help others avoid your mistakes?

Good luck. It seems you are getting refocused.

RRunner said:

How focused is your niche selection?

It would be better to get more details about your niche even if you don't want to reveal it exactly.

Is it a YMYL niche like health or finance? How deep did you go into a sub-niche?

Is it a niche with lots of information seeking keywords as well as buyer keywords?

You said your keywords were way off. Have you been able to find better keywords using better research?

Any tips for niche and keyword research that would help others avoid your mistakes?

Good luck. It seems you are getting refocused.

Click to expand...

My niche isn't exactly YMYL type. It's related to health, though. Therefore, the number of topics I could write in this niche is almost endless, given that there are enough low-difficulty KWs.

I guess a lot of you know this, but my biggest lessons from this half a year journey are:

1. Start establishing authority on narrow topics where competition is almost non-existent. Big topics seem tempting for a newbie, but I'd strongly advise keeping away from this temptation.
2. Reverse engineer high authority websites. It means to search for low-difficulty KWs by plugging in high authority websites in ahrefs. You will see a lot of low competition KWs that the articles rank for, but at the same time their position is like 50-100 in Google search for that article. It's an opportunity to snatch some good long-tail keywords.
3. Don't blindly trust the difficulty of KWs. That's how I ended up in this position.
4. Focus on long-tail keywords. It has been said a lot, but I can't emphasize how important it is.
5. Better to spend more time searching for good KWs that have a very good volume, rather than writing 5 articles just to match that 1 article (in terms of searching volume/clicks). It's worth spending additional 10 minutes to find a good KW rather than spending a few days writing a few more articles just to match the volume. Save your time.
6. Establish as much trust in your website as possible (testimonials, references, introducing your writing ethics and methodologies to readers, etc).
7. Provide higher quality content than your competitors and build quality backlinks.

Perhaps there are more lessons that I've learned, but these are the ones that popped into my mind first. These tips sound generic, but they're very crucial, in my opinion.