Publishers often get annoyed when they don’t get enough traffic on their website. the worst part is you might do everything right and yet see no result. These are the two most common questions that publishers often ask me: How long will it take to get traffic on my blog and Why my website is not getting any traffic?
Frankly speaking, there is no actual answer to that. Getting traffic on your website is a blessing. You might do everything right and have some really good content. But at the end of the day, you might not have anyone searching for your content.
This becomes very frustrating and most of the publishers and website owners give up because of this reason. Site traffic is not only your source of income, but it also inspires you to keep working and developing more content. When you see that spike in your website traffic, you realize your hard work is paying off.
Why Is It Tough To Get Website Traffic?
Back in 2014 when I built my first website, I was so anxious. I used to check my website traffic everyday. I used to look at my analytics dashboard and see if get any website visitor.
Literally every single day I would log into my analytics and check if there is an increase in traffic. I would see if I have any new website visitor and if I’m getting any returning visitor. I used to look at every metric and just kept wondering when will I reach that 1000 website visitor milestone.
This might seem silly to someone, but it’s actually a common practice for people who are just starting out. Previously I used to think once my website gets online I’m gonna make so much money. I thought it was easy to get at least 1000 hits every day out of 5.8 billion Google searches.
Getting website traffic is not so easy. It takes a lot of time, hard work, and patience. You can’t expect to get 1000 visitors everyday when you are just starting out with 10-20 posts.
I always compare it to offline shops in the real world. Suppose you have built a fancy clothing store on a very busy street. Surely you can expect at least one person would walk in everyday right?
What are the chances that nobody visits your shop? In this case none. People will visit your offline store. Whether they buy or not is a totally different issue. But they would actually get inside your store to explore.
But sadly, the internet doesn’t work that way.
You can think of it more like hundreds of thousands of people opening a clothing store all next to each other in the middle of the desert and hoping that someone just happens to be walking through it, and then from those unlimited number options, they would choose your store and walks in.
You might find it a bit brutal, but that’s actually a close analogy of this situation.
There are over 547200 new websites created every day and Google crawls 80 billion pages on a regular basis. There are over 5 million blog posts published every single day. What are the chances that a visitor would want to click on your blog?
Among those 5 million blog posts most of them will never see a single visitor. So what can be done about it? Actually it all depends on you. How much time you spend on developing your content.
How Long Does it take to Get Website Traffic?
Just like I’ve said before, there is no actual answer to that. I think this is a pretty vague question. It is possible that you can start getting traffic on day 1. You can theoretically get thousands of visitors to your blog within days of launching. But it is very unusual to happen.
For example, let’s say you have a Twitter account with millions of followers. All you have to do is make a tweet or two pointing your followers to your new blog and you’ll get a flood of traffic. Or maybe you published one of your blog posts on Reddit and somehow, it gets voted up to the front page. You might get more traffic than you can imagine.
Yes, you will get tons of traffic doing this. But the problem is, these are short-term solutions to getting traffic. All those traffic that you will get is not likely to return to your website. So maybe this s not the best of your strategies to rely on.
Rather you can focus more on your SEO and expect to get organic traffic from Google. This is the best practice for publishers. This is why you should focus more on SEO to get consistent traffic on your website.
How Long Will It Take To Get Traffic With SEO
SEO is a long term process and often takes time. But once you are on the top of Google SERP you can expect to get consistent traffic on your website. If you are looking for traffic on your blog there is no other alternative than SEO.
It all depends on how many Backlinks did you manage to get on your website. If you have a strong backlink, you can expect to see changes overnight.
The number of traffic your website is getting also on what keywords you’re targeting. You need to research keywords for your blog posts to rank high on Google (low-competition keywords rank easier than high-competition keywords).
Usually, it takes 3-6 months till you see any changes in your rank and get consistent traffic on your blog.
The average time it takes for a new blog to get traction in the search engines is around 3 to 6 months.
But for that to happen you need to consistently publish high-quality content and articles on your blog. And, of course, you need to make sure that you keep building high-quality backlinks to your blog. Not only it will increase your traffic but also it will improve your Domain Authority and Domain Rating.
Does Google Sandbox Affect Blog Traffic
Some of you might be familiar with Google Sandbox. When you are just starting out a new blog or website it takes a while before starting to rank in Google (usually 3 to 6 months, sometimes up to a year).
This filtration process that prevents new websites from ranking in Google’s top results instantly is called ‘Google Sandbox‘
This is like a probation period for new sites. It’s to prevent spammers from throwing up new blogs to rank for big keywords and make a quick profit. It used to work in the past, but not today.
Even if you do everything right, your site won’t get decent rankings until this probation period comes to an end. No matter how skilled you are at SEO and how great your site is, your blog or website will have to go through this process.
Although it is very frustrating for publishers who work so hard to develop their content without seeing any visible result. But is a very good filtration as some websites just try to rank with deceitful ways.
I think every website owner should respect the Google sandbox and comply with the company’s policy. For someone like me, who repeatedly builds new niche sites, I don’t mind the sandbox at all. Blogs are a long-term play for me anyways.
Don’t give up if you don’t see any visible traffic in your first 6-9 months. Eventually, if you keep creating new content consistently you will see good results and a spike in your website traffic. keep growing your articles and blog and stop worrying about traffic.
There are a lot of ways you can get short-time traffic for your website. Those methods will help you make some money and help you stay in business. But make sure that you target for a long-term play.
Bottomline
Yes, traffic is very necessary for your website to grow. But if you keep focusing on getting more traffic rather than improving your content, you won’t be able to make it big.
How long does it take to get blog traffic?
Stop asking this question and rather focus on your SEO and link building. SEO will provide you with reliable, repeatable, and consistent traffic sources for the long-term growth of your blog.
You might not see any significant traffic on your website in the first year. Sometimes it can take years to grow your traffic. But once you have a consistent traffic n your website, it will be worth it.
Stop focusing on short-term traffic and try developing content in the long run. Yes, short-term traffic is also important but try focusing more on your content development.
Social media and community sites provide instant traffic but those traffic sources are short-lived. You’ll see a spike in traffic one day, and the next day it’ll be back to zero.
Plus, these are not repeatable strategies that you can do over and over again.
In conclusion, it takes time to grow traffic but once you do it, you will be amazed.
