Before starting your blogging adventure, it’s worth knowing that growing a blog is a process. It takes time and effort to generate traffic, i.e. to gather readers.
The frequency of visits to a blog is mainly influenced by its visibility in search engines. It is therefore important to take care of good SEO, i.e. to ensure that your posts reach the top of Google search results. Today, a few words about why the blog positioning process takes time and after what time you can expect results.
Why does it take so long to develop a blog?
People who set up a blog often expect to become instantly recognisable after publishing a few posts. Unfortunately, this is not how it works.
Initially, Google’s algorithm is just testing the quality of a new site. It does not immediately place its trust and articles in the top positions. Therefore, you are unlikely to see significant traffic to your blog for the first few months.
In my experience, you have to wait a minimum of a year to see the first significant results in this area. If you don’t take my word for it, you can check it yourself with the Semstorm tool.
Open semstorm.com, register and, once logged in, enter the address of any website (e.g. your favourite blog).
In the free version, the tool will take you all the way back to 2015. This will allow you to see how traffic to your chosen site has changed over the years. In most cases, at least 12 months pass between the publication of the first article and the occurrence of significant traffic to the site.
Below I have included the screenshot with a graph showing the traffic on the selected blog (from the date the first article was published to now). I have deliberately blurred the name and address of the site, as I don’t know if the author would have wished for such a publication.
However, thanks to the Semstorm tool, you can check how traffic has increased on the selected sites.
The graph clearly shows that gaining traffic and growing a blog resembles a snowball effect. Seemingly not much happens at the beginning, but over time the traffic starts to grow at an increasingly fast rate.
How to increase blog traffic faster?
The fact that you have to wait for the results of your blogging efforts is obvious. However, you can significantly influence the positioning of your articles in search engines. In order for posts to rank at the top in Google, they need to be optimised for SEO. That is, they should have the right structure – including an H1 title tag, header tags (H2, H3, H4, etc.), paragraphs, links, and metadata. The texts should include keywords, i.e. phrases that are frequently typed by users in Google searches.
It is important to write about things that are of real interest to your audience. Instead of publishing posts based on your own guesses, it is better to use tools (even free ones) that show which phrases have the greatest potential.
In my opinion, without knowledge of SEO and knowledge of other tools, there is practically no point in starting a blog. If your posts don’t start appearing in the top search results, readers won’t come to your blog and all your efforts will be in vain.
The second equally important issue that affects blog positioning is regularity. Google’s algorithm favours sites that are regularly enriched with new content. Therefore, to increase traffic to your blog faster, it is worth publishing at least several articles per month.
In summary, it takes a long time to develop a blog, but the knowledge of writing for SEO and regularity pays off. 🙂