12 Articles Driving 7,000 Visits Per Month in Just 7 Months
In August 2021, we had an idea to build a niche website on a topic we were passionate about. This was our second niche website (you can see the first here).
At the time, we had almost 2 years of experience building websites and SEO, so it came a lot easier than the first.
Here are the steps we took.
| Timeline | Total Number of Articles | Results |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2021 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2021 | 12 | 1,900 Pageviews Per Month |
| Feb 2022 | 12 | 3,700 Pageviews Per Month |
| Apr 2022 | 12 | 7,400 Pageviews Per Month |
Step 1: Discovering The Niche
Before building anything, we made sure to confirm the niche/industry had enough search volume. We did this primarily using Google Trends and Autosuggest, but we also did our YouTube and “gut” check.
We uncovered seed keywords and used them to compile a list of 10 initial topics for the site (later to be 12 topics). Our focus was to build out an initial subcategory to launch the site.
For example, if the site was about fishing, we selected a fish that didn’t have a lot of competition in the search results. For example, “trout”.
Later, if we desired, we could expand with additional categories.
Pro-Tip: For new websites, it’s often best to start with low-competition keywords and topics. Then, after your website grows in traffic and authority, you can write for higher and higher competing topics.
These topics were specifically selected to have the following criteria:
- Low-Competition
- Decent Search Volume
- Relevant to The Category
- Relevant to The Website
- Collectively Form a Comprehensive Resource
So, now that we had our niche and topics selected, it was time to build the website.
Step 2: Building The Website
Websites and SEO are often overcomplicated.
The reality is for most small and medium businesses you can get away with using a responsive WordPress theme. These templates not only make designing quite a bit easier but usually provide your website to be fast and mobile-responsive.
As a result, you’re checking a lot of the website functionality boxes right away.
And that’s exactly what we did.
Then, we built out simple pages:
- Home
- About
- Contact
We made sure to include who the website was for and how it can help them. Later, we added a privacy policy and a terms and conditions page.
Since this was a simple website, the whole process took about 1 day.
Step 3: Writing Articles
Since this was our second website, we wanted to test if our method could genuinely produce results (and we didn’t just get lucky with our first).
So, we kept the articles in-house—personally writing them all myself.
I wrote 1 article every day for almost 2 weeks. Since I had written over 200 articles at this point for our first website, each article took about 2-3 hours.
In other words, it took a total of about 40 hours to launch both the website and SEO plan (~35 hours for the keyword research and articles, the rest for the website).
We figured that 10 articles would be a good number to build out a single topic cluster and start getting results, but I added 2 more to be safe.
Then, we requested the articles to be indexed on Google, turned on ads, and waited.
Step 4: Left to Rank
We had built the website and SEO plan in August 2021, and now we were letting it sit.
To age and rank on Google, like a fine wine.
Luckily, we had our main website to work on, so we weren’t constantly checking this website. That, and since it was our second time around, the waiting period felt a lot faster.
Even though the niche did the best in the spring and summer, we saw some promising signs fairly early on.
In the first 3 months, we saw between 1,000 and 2,000 visits per month.
Then, in January 2022, it hit over 3,000 visits, peaking for the year at over 7,000 visits in April (peak season).
Final Thoughts
We had other projects that took priority, so we didn’t end up developing this site further, but it became a nice test site for us.
It ended up averaging over 4,000 visits per month for over 2 years and still brings in visitors today. With ads, the 40 hours we put into the site have more than paid for itself.
As this was our second attempt at building a website with SEO, it was a nice confidence boost!
