Progress of a NEW website and some INTERESTING stats

Hey guys,

So, let me get straight to the point. I'm going to share some stats of my latest blog and would appreciate if you can give your honest opinion.

Blog started on: Last week of May, 2021.
CMS - WordPress

Niche: Android
Difficulty: A lot of the keywords I'm targeting are currently being dominated by the biggies of Android, such as XDA, Android Authority, Android Central, Beebom etc. Those are very high authority websites in my niche.

Articles posted till date: 13 (last one on 1 July, didn't get time after that)
All the articles are original and handwritten. Some of them follow the skyscraper technique.
Average length of articles: I haven't done the math. But most articles are around 1400-1800 words long, a couple of them are around 2500 and 1 crosses the 3000 words mark.

SEO done:

Basic on-site and on-page SEO has been done using Rank Math SEO plugin.
More work needs to be done here such as taking care of a lot of recommendations and warnings from Ahrefs and Ubersuggest.

Link building - I have not started serious link building, but here's what I have done so far.

Wikipedia - 2
Content publishing platforms - 4
Social bookmarks - 4
Blog comments - 1
Forum profile - 0

Black hat SEO techniques - None

Speed optimization: Using LiteSpeed Cache plugin

Now, let's jump into the stats stats from GSC:




(Ignore the spike in CTR and Avg. position at the start as I was doing a lot of site:mywebsite.com queries. It seems I stopped doing that around 6/13/21)

Some more stats:





I can share some more stats related to how I'm ranking for various queries, but let's not over-complicate things here.
It's been around 2 weeks (that is, after a month of starting the blog) that my posts have broken into the 10 top in SERPs for a number of mid volume queries.

It gets interesting here.



My blog gets a lot more impressions for Desktop searches, but the links get clicked more often on Mobile searches.
Again, the impressions on Desktop searches are more even though the average position is worse than Mobile searches.

That means, even though the users are seeing my website's links in Google searches a lot more frequently on a desktop, the mobile users tend to click on them more often than the desktop guys.

This probably tells us something about the user behavior. I find it strange and amusing at the same time.

If you're still with me, let me try to get some expert opinion. Positive criticism is welcome.

1. Do you have an explanation for the desktop-mobile behavior that I explained above?
2. How would you rate the progress as far as the impressions and clicks are concerned? If you think I'm not doing as good as I should have, please tell me the areas I should improve on.
3. My last post (posted 15 days ago) has got just 6 impressions and 0 clicks till now. It is the best piece of content on my blog, a 3000+ words skyscraper. Whereas, the second-last post, of decent quality and less than 2000 words long is already ranking in top 10 for a few decent queries, got 500 impressions and around 20 clicks. The keywords I'm targeting for these two posts are of similar difficulty levels. Can anybody explain why this would happen?
4. I'm targeting a lot of difficult keywords (yes, I can be crazy at times). What would be your strategy if you were in my place with a bunch of heavyweights sitting at the top of SERPs and you trying to make some space for yourself up there?
5. Do you think I should take my time and build quality content or focus on the quantity?
6. Would you like me to share updates and stats on my progress from time to time?
7. Any other suggestions?

If you're answering to any of these questions, please make good use of the numbers

Still with me? Thanks buddy!

nYXem said:

My last post (posted 15 days ago) has got just 6 impressions and 0 clicks till now. It is the best piece of content on my blog, a 3000+ words skyscraper. Whereas, the second-last post, of decent quality and less than 2000 words long is already ranking in top 10 for a few decent queries, got 500 impressions and around 20 clicks. The keywords I'm targeting for these two posts are of similar difficulty levels. Can anybody explain why this would happen?

Click to expand...

I can only guess, but... I've heard someone say a few weeks ago that the "black sheep syndrome" is real with google. What this means is that if all (or most) URLs ranking on google's 1st page for a certain keywords have the content between a certain limit (say, the lowest number of words is 800 and the highest 2000) your 3000 words long content is seen as the black sheep because google... well, the idiot googlebot, that is.... thinks that the content should be between 800 and 2000 words since all those pages ranking in top 10 have these limits and if you don't fall within these limits the (obviously retarded) googlebot thinks that you are doing something shady, and it won't rank you.

Again, I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's the only thing I could think of regarding this point.

Regarding point #5.... given how competitive your niche and keywords seem the solution is quality, not quantity. But not even this is enough on its own. Tough competition can only be broken with strong backlinks. Ok, maybe not "only", but most of the time strong backlinks is what outranks your tough competition. Oh, and good domain authority but this usually comes with strong backlinks, so....

I published 27 articles on my blog and I only have 10 impressions a day, to see these statistics I think my site is broken

I think you might be at the point where you start looking for links.

If you are using the skyscraper technique the theory behind it is you can reach out to sites that linked to content that is not as complete are yours.

I'm in a similar point in my journey.

The difference is I created the blog 3 years ago but I abandoned it really early. It did grow to around 1000 organic visits a day according to Semrush. I cant remember what Google told me I was getting.

Anyway, after 2.5 years off from messing with the site my keywords are back to page 2-3 and are sort of stuck there for a couple of weeks. I have been doing some link-building but no big jumps yet. My link-building efforts have been 2 press releases and 5 outreach links from high traffic blogs (4 to the same page, 1 to a related page)
That particular page has 43 different keywords anywhere from position 21 to position 99

Mostly variations of Buy, purchase, online.
EX: product online, buy product online, purchase product online, where can I find product online, order product online, where to find product online.

You get the picture. Its not something I can really create a ton of new posts for that targets a "sub topic" although I do drop some internal links back to the page.

So if I create a "post called product guide" I might have an internal link with the KW "buy product online" pointing back to the buy page.

I also just no indexed my tag pages becasue when I did a Goolge "keyword" Site: mywebsite.com search I saw tag pages outranking some other content pages. just did that yesterday using Yoast. Im hoping that squeezes some juice to the internal pages.

Anyway, you can see how I am eager to get those KW's to page one but I dont want to blow up my progress either.


Best of luck to you though, looks like you are on the right track.


thats a little more than half of them, all with buying intent. You can see why Im anxious to move them up!

tazarbm said:

I can only guess, but... I've heard someone say a few weeks ago that the "black sheep syndrome" is real with google. What this means is that if all (or most) URLs ranking on google's 1st page for a certain keywords have the content between a certain limit (say, the lowest number of words is 800 and the highest 2000) your 3000 words long content is seen as the black sheep because google... well, the idiot googlebot, that is.... thinks that the content should be between 800 and 2000 words since all those pages ranking in top 10 have these limits and if you don't fall within these limits the (obviously retarded) googlebot thinks that you are doing something shady, and it won't rank you.

Again, I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's the only thing I could think of regarding this point.

Regarding point #5.... given how competitive your niche and keywords seem the solution is quality, not quantity. But not even this is enough on its own. Tough competition can only be broken with strong backlinks. Ok, maybe not "only", but most of the time strong backlinks is what outranks your tough competition. Oh, and good domain authority but this usually comes with strong backlinks, so....

Click to expand...

You might be right. I have one piece of content that is almost 10k words.

Not garbage either. Its been around 2 weeks and it still isnt even showing up for longtails. But my 2500 word content has 40+ variations of a buying keyword. But that content was old...but I repurposed it from 700 words to 2500 about a month ago.

wonder what (if anything) I should do with that MASSIVE piece of content.

Getwhatchuwant said:

You might be right. I have one piece of content that is almost 10k words.

Not garbage either. Its been around 2 weeks and it still isnt even showing up for longtails. But my 2500 word content has 40+ variations of a buying keyword. But that content was old...but I repurposed it from 700 words to 2500 about a month ago.

wonder what (if anything) I should do with that MASSIVE piece of content.

Click to expand...

It's completely anecdotal and has no data to back it up, But I have started seeing google prefer shorter articles over long ones. People are too lazy to read for more than a minute or 2 these days, I imagine that intent has a lot to do with it. Take this observation with a grain of salt ofc, it could just be the niche im in.

tazarbm said:

I can only guess, but... I've heard someone say a few weeks ago that the "black sheep syndrome" is real with google. What this means is that if all (or most) URLs ranking on google's 1st page for a certain keywords have the content between a certain limit (say, the lowest number of words is 800 and the highest 2000) your 3000 words long content is seen as the black sheep because google... well, the idiot googlebot, that is.... thinks that the content should be between 800 and 2000 words since all those pages ranking in top 10 have these limits and if you don't fall within these limits the (obviously retarded) googlebot thinks that you are doing something shady, and it won't rank you.

Again, I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's the only thing I could think of regarding this point.

Regarding point #5.... given how competitive your niche and keywords seem the solution is quality, not quantity. But not even this is enough on its own. Tough competition can only be broken with strong backlinks. Ok, maybe not "only", but most of the time strong backlinks is what outranks your tough competition. Oh, and good domain authority but this usually comes with strong backlinks, so....

Click to expand...

That's very much possible. More so in this case as all the top 10 articles on Google for my keywords are not really long-form, probably in the 800-1400 word range. So, my content looks like the odd one out.

How does the idea of breaking it down into 2 articles seem to you? With the first article pointing to the second in the end and the second article linking back to the first one in the beginning. Probably a stupid idea as I don't see Google ranking the same website twice in the top 10 very often except for very high authority websites.

Getwhatchuwant said:

I think you might be at the point where you start looking for links.

If you are using the skyscraper technique the theory behind it is you can reach out to sites that linked to content that is not as complete are yours.

I'm in a similar point in my journey.

The difference is I created the blog 3 years ago but I abandoned it really early. It did grow to around 1000 organic visits a day according to Semrush. I cant remember what Google told me I was getting.

Anyway, after 2.5 years off from messing with the site my keywords are back to page 2-3 and are sort of stuck there for a couple of weeks. I have been doing some link-building but no big jumps yet. My link-building efforts have been 2 press releases and 5 outreach links from high traffic blogs (4 to the same page, 1 to a related page)
That particular page has 43 different keywords anywhere from position 21 to position 99

Mostly variations of Buy, purchase, online.
EX: product online, buy product online, purchase product online, where can I find product online, order product online, where to find product online.

You get the picture. Its not something I can really create a ton of new posts for that targets a "sub topic" although I do drop some internal links back to the page.

So if I create a "post called product guide" I might have an internal link with the KW "buy product online" pointing back to the buy page.

I also just no indexed my tag pages becasue when I did a Goolge "keyword" Site: mywebsite.com search I saw tag pages outranking some other content pages. just did that yesterday using Yoast. Im hoping that squeezes some juice to the internal pages.

Anyway, you can see how I am eager to get those KW's to page one but I dont want to blow up my progress either.


Best of luck to you though, looks like you are on the right track.
View attachment 179301View attachment 179302View attachment 179303View attachment 179304

thats a little more than half of them, all with buying intent. You can see why Im anxious to move them up!

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing your experience and I wish you the best too!
Unlike a new site like mine, you can probably get a little more aggressive with your link building efforts.
Approximately how much traffic are you getting from Google right now? Also, is this your primary source?

leechesBleechin said:

It's completely anecdotal and has no data to back it up, But I have started seeing google prefer shorter articles over long ones. People are too lazy to read for more than a minute or 2 these days, I imagine that intent has a lot to do with it. Take this observation with a grain of salt ofc, it could just be the niche im in.

Click to expand...

A lot of the concepts/methods in SEO are anecdotal and of course, Google won't tell us what to do for better SEO, except for the obvious basic guidelines.
I started writing long-form content after reading the blogs of some popular SEOs. It probably works as well.
But definitely not always.

The article that drives most of the organic traffic to my website is somewhere around 1200 words long. It ranks higher than far better and older (but updated) content from authority websites. It's weird.

It's almost like Google deliberately wants to confuse us on what to do

nYXem said:

How does the idea of breaking it down into 2 articles seem to you?

Click to expand...

I don't know what to say cause I've never had to make this decision

Some folks on this forum have said that content that ranks is usually best left untouched and if this is true and you really want to split your content into 2 parts I would leave the first part (the one that you want to rank for) untouched and rewrite the other part to make it 100% unique and optimized for a totally different keyword. That could probably work, but again, I've not tested this so I only say what others have said

tazarbm said:

I don't know what to say cause I've never had to make this decision

Some folks on this forum have said that content that ranks is usually best left untouched and if this is true and you really want to split your content into 2 parts I would leave the first part (the one that you want to rank for) untouched and rewrite the other part to make it 100% unique and optimized for a totally different keyword. That could probably work, but again, I've not tested this so I only say what others have said

Click to expand...

Thanks for your take on this.

breakcode said:

I published 27 articles on my blog and I only have 10 impressions a day, to see these statistics I think my site is broken

Click to expand...

hi Mate

it is really handsome no. of aritcles you published .
have you done the Seo and backlinking of your site and aritcales?
use guest posting and 301 redirect backlinks seo technique for your site and have links of your site on high authority site as well . your site will fetch organic traffic and rank like rocket speed in google

nYXem said:

That's very much possible. More so in this case as all the top 10 articles on Google for my keywords are not really long-form, probably in the 800-1400 word range. So, my content looks like the odd one out.

How does the idea of breaking it down into 2 articles seem to you? With the first article pointing to the second in the end and the second article linking back to the first one in the beginning. Probably a stupid idea as I don't see Google ranking the same website twice in the top 10 very often except for very high authority websites.

Thanks for sharing your experience and I wish you the best too!
Unlike a new site like mine, you can probably get a little more aggressive with your link building efforts.
Approximately how much traffic are you getting from Google right now? Also, is this your primary source?

A lot of the concepts/methods in SEO are anecdotal and of course, Google won't tell us what to do for better SEO, except for the obvious basic guidelines.
I started writing long-form content after reading the blogs of some popular SEOs. It probably works as well.
But definitely not always.

The article that drives most of the organic traffic to my website is somewhere around 1200 words long. It ranks higher than far better and older (but updated) content from authority websites. It's weird.

It's almost like Google deliberately wants to confuse us on what to do

Click to expand...

I am getting very little traffic right now and ranking is very slow even after pruning and rewriting several posts. On the flip side its moving up inch by inch, I am just anxious to get to the first page since the first 3-5 page ranking came quickly.

It is the only site I work on BTW. Really, just for something to do.

As far as link-building, I usually hit the site with a press release or two as this is a pretty normal practice anyway by real New businesses. Also, it can logically explain to a human how someone might see the release and potentially link to your site. How this applies to an algorithm , I don't know. But I tend to build links as soon as see some positive position movement for a keyword.

Like I said, its slow going because I am doing outreach anyway. I'm very hesitant to blast the site with links.

Getwhatchuwant said:

I am getting very little traffic right now and ranking is very slow even after pruning and rewriting several posts. On the flip side its moving up inch by inch, I am just anxious to get to the first page since the first 3-5 page ranking came quickly.

It is the only site I work on BTW. Really, just for something to do.

As far as link-building, I usually hit the site with a press release or two as this is a pretty normal practice anyway by real New businesses. Also, it can logically explain to a human how someone might see the release and potentially link to your site. How this applies to an algorithm , I don't know. But I tend to build links as soon as see some positive position movement for a keyword.

Like I said, its slow going because I am doing outreach anyway. I'm very hesitant to blast the site with links.

Click to expand...

Hey, thanks again for your insights. It seems I missed your response.

Anyone else who can give an explanation on my queries?

are you monetizing the site?
Best of luck on your journey

I must say, you're really obsessed with things here, I have been doing the same when starting out, but well
I have a website optimised for mobile users and it does get more impressions with just a few clicks,
average CTR is 0.3% while it's 20% for mobile while desktop impressions are much more,
I don't know what would possibly cause this, but it's completely normal

The only problem with your current process is targeting some difficult keywords and not building enough links,
Authority websites can be outranked & difficulty depends on their ranking pages,
For example, a Wikipedia page non-optimized for some keyword(s) with no links pointing to it can be easily outranked with decent content & couple of links,
You should evaluate the difficulty based on how much the top pages are optimized and the links pointing to them

So, you can outrank such types of pages if you build the right content & invest in good links,
Or you can simply target less competitive keywords which would need more content to bring the traffic and less investment in links

B17zr said:

are you monetizing the site?
Best of luck on your journey

Click to expand...

No, buddy. I don't plan to monetize it any time soon.

hideath said:

I must say, you're really obsessed with things here, I have been doing the same when starting out, but well
I have a website optimised for mobile users and it does get more impressions with just a few clicks,
average CTR is 0.3% while it's 20% for mobile while desktop impressions are much more,
I don't know what would possibly cause this, but it's completely normal

The only problem with your current process is targeting some difficult keywords and not building enough links,
Authority websites can be outranked & difficulty depends on their ranking pages,
For example, a Wikipedia page non-optimized for some keyword(s) with no links pointing to it can be easily outranked with decent content & couple of links,
You should evaluate the difficulty based on how much the top pages are optimized and the links pointing to them

So, you can outrank such types of pages if you build the right content & invest in good links,
Or you can simply target less competitive keywords which would need more content to bring the traffic and less investment in links

Click to expand...

Thanks for your take on this. Very much appreciated.

I guess and really hope you're right at saying the mobile-desktop thing is normal.

Keywords - To be honest, I'm deliberately targeting some difficult keywords and luckily it's returning good results so far.
Link building - Yes, I plan to start some serious link building campaigns soon.

By the way, I'm not really "starting out", it's been over 12 years this is my hobby
I had some queries and my curiosity can be over-the-top at times

nYXem said:

No, buddy. I don't plan to monetize it any time soon.

Thanks for your take on this. Very much appreciated.

I guess and really hope you're right at saying the mobile-desktop thing is normal.

Keywords - To be honest, I'm deliberately targeting some difficult keywords and luckily it's returning good results so far.
Link building - Yes, I plan to start some serious link building campaigns soon.

By the way, I'm not really "starting out", it's been over 12 years this is my hobby
I had some queries and my curiosity can be over-the-top at times

Click to expand...

No problem dude,
it's a good thing in fact, gathering up more details would help out

Pretty good results for a 2 months old website with only 13 posts, 25k words. The prevalence of mobile over desktop might be due to the topic (android). Good luck.

kaudo said:

Pretty good results for a 2 months old website with only 13 posts, 25k words. The prevalence of mobile over desktop might be due to the topic (android). Good luck.

Click to expand...

That's a possibility. Thanks for pointing this out!

tazarbm said:

I can only guess, but... I've heard someone say a few weeks ago that the "black sheep syndrome" is real with google. What this means is that if all (or most) URLs ranking on google's 1st page for a certain keywords have the content between a certain limit (say, the lowest number of words is 800 and the highest 2000) your 3000 words long content is seen as the black sheep because google... well, the idiot googlebot, that is.... thinks that the content should be between 800 and 2000 words since all those pages ranking in top 10 have these limits and if you don't fall within these limits the (obviously retarded) googlebot thinks that you are doing something shady, and it won't rank you.

Again, I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's the only thing I could think of regarding this point.

Regarding point #5.... given how competitive your niche and keywords seem the solution is quality, not quantity. But not even this is enough on its own. Tough competition can only be broken with strong backlinks. Ok, maybe not "only", but most of the time strong backlinks is what outranks your tough competition. Oh, and good domain authority but this usually comes with strong backlinks, so....

Click to expand...

It's a common misconception that number of words matter to google. There are pages with very little words that outrank pages with a lot of them, and there are pages that are long and that outrank pages with few words.

Google mostly cares about how relevant your content is to user, how much value it provides, and also user experience.
In this particular situation it's hard to tell, but it could be the fact that OP's website is new, therefore has low "authority" etc. Thus, google ranks it lower. It's the way things should be and have to be.

@nYXem - are you blog posts competing with each other for the same keyword? i think you are, that is why you are having a hard time getting a higher ranking.

without giving away your keywords, can you mention the title few of your blog posts? use red apple example. i.e. where to buy the best red apple? how to root a red apple phone?!