3 Months In, 582 Articles, ~17 Clicks/day according to GSC, ~50 Visitors/day according to GA -> Should I be worried?

Akrtw1

Akrtw1

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Hi BuSo,

Started this site on 6/21. Would like to go with volume strategy.

Most articles are recipes and I use the WPRM plugin diligently, asking my writers to fill in as many details as possible (e.g. Course, Prep time, Calories, etc.).

582 Articles so far. Here is the traffic data:

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Since I am using the recipe plugin, I am winning a lot of snippets:

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I did not do any link building so far. But because it's an aged domain, it has 4k backlinks and 200 RD come with it.

Questions:
  • For those of your who have been there, done that, is my trajectory normal?
  • All of my articles have 3-5 Amazon Affiliate links pointing people to ingredients I recommend. Is this a good practice or would Google punish me for putting links in literally ALL recipes?
Thank you in advanced!
 
At a year old and that number of articles you should be seeing more traction.

This tells me that the terms you are targeting are too competitive for where you currently sit in Google's world view.

You need to target lower competition kws OR you need to start buying links to power up your existing content.

Edit:

Just seen its only 3 months old.

Keep publishing - it is far too soon for Google to understand and index your content properly.
 
Here is a screenshot at the 3-month mark of my site that just recently hit 2,000+ organic searches a day (9 months old). Very similar to what you have thus far.

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Things are looking good on your end - just keep publishing. I saw a big jump from month 5 to month 6 as I went from 200 to 500 organic clicks per day. Things will start moving quick for you soon - I'd say you're about 2-3 months away from that point.
 
It's way too soon for you to be stressing. The problem is compounded by the fact that you've published a good number of articles in a short period of time, so your expectations are even higher. Everything takes time to age. Domains, individual pages, backlinks, etc. It's how Google fights spam. If you can publish almost 600 articles and take over the SERPs in 3 months, then so could spammers and we'd all be screwed. Keep publishing and don't ignore getting new links either. It'll help, because it sounds like right now all of your links point to the homepage. That's okay but you'll benefit from some new links too so Google sees that real people are finding your content valuable in the present.
 
You're doing a good job. Don't be worried. The GSC impressions and clicks are in an upward trend. That's a good sign. You're just anxious. Relax and keep going.
 
I am more worried that you're doing recipes, those are supposedly difficult to monetize.
 
bernard said:
I am more worried that you're doing recipes, those are supposedly difficult to monetize.
Click to expand...
Do you mean RPM wise? First idea that comes to mind is create a lead magnet that aligns with the expected visitor to that page (i.e. '15 Tasty Low-Carb Recipes for Busy Keto-ers' on recipes tagged keto) to get them on your list, tag them as keto, then from there the possibilities are endless.
 
Recipes do fine RPM wise. The real trouble is ranking. People type long stories to help rank which google will smack soon because it’s off-intent. Then tou have “jump to recipe” links that have viewers skip ads. RPMs will suffer in that niche eventually. Mediavine has a plug-in that puts an ad in a block with the recipe that gets high RPMs. It of course it’s one or two ads tops. It’s going to get tricky over time. Print cookbooks are an obvious solution as well as personal branding. I remember when The Pioneer Woman was a rinky dink blog and now her products get a ton of Walmart shelf space.
 
Thank you so much for everyone's reply. It's so good to get positive feedback from the likes of @MrMedia @Ryuzaki @larcha and all the veterans here, who inspired me to start at the first place! Thanks @Philip J. Fry for your kind words as well!

I will keep publishing and report back in 5-6 month time. Hopefully I can bring you all some good news by then.

My first batch of keywords are mostly really low KD (0-3) so the volume is not that high, mostly 100-300 according to Ahrefs. And most of them are recipes keywords. But moving forward, I may switch to more informational articles just to test out which ranks better.

Another concern of mine is using too many Amazon Affiliate links - I literally have a dedicated "Recommended Ingredients" section in more than 80% of my articles that list 3-5 Amazon links. I read somewhere that Google has punished some affiliate sites so was worried that it's hindering my progress. But I am going to switch to more info articles anyway so let's see.
 
I took a look at your thread.

First, off congratulations, you keep maintaining steady content, this s good.

How does your competition look on the first page? What DR do they have?

How is your topical authority?

For example, take your top competitors for say "cake recipes".
Write in google: site:competitor.com "cake"
How many articles about cake do they have, how many do you have. (Ignore ahrefs traffic). This is about topical relevance.

Did you do any link building? For a recipe site such as yours, I would link out from one guest post to 2-3 articles of yours. Again topical relevance, if you have a chocolate cake recipe, vanilla cake recipe, coconut cake recipe it is natural to do this.

You mentioned you do videos. Are they published on youtube as well? Link opportunity there as well, even if it is no follow.
 
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