I’m happy to report that I hit 200 daily organic visits for my niche website, The Stadium Reviews. The niche website is primarily about parking information for all major sports teams, so it’s seasonal via traffic. Now that we are in December 2019, I hit a milestone in daily organic traffic on a Sunday due to football interest. Here is some insight below via the numbers.
Traffic Goal Hit
On December 8th, 2019, my niche website drove 221 organic sessions in one day. The day before, my site was able to drive 194 organic visits, so I knew Sunday would be the milestone. Being in December, my organic traffic is seasonal, so Sundays are my big traffic days right now. When the NFL season comes to a close and baseball resumes in April, I should see more stable traffic throughout the week.
SEO Things Worked On
As you can see in the picture above, my traffic (according to SEMRush) keeps growing with organic keywords. Ranking for more keywords is the key to driving additional traffic to your site. A screenshot above like this give me confidence that I’m on the upswing and traffic should keep increasing. Some significant highlights took place over the past few months that contribute to the growth in ranking keywords are below.
- Wrote all parking pages for all major sports
- Repurposing existing pages that were on page 2 of Google to try and increase the organic rank
- Updated the XML and HTML sitemap from a technical perspective
- Disavowed unhealthy domains per the suggestion of SEMRush
- Added more internal links on related city pages other parking pages
- Updated title tags for top pages to drive more non-brand traffic
- And more
Market Share Growth
I use SEMRush to monitor my competitors on a semi-regular basis. Taking away market share is a long-term goal, so I like to break down my goals via smaller steps. In the picture above, you can see how my site now shows up as a competitor to my actual competitors. Again, I know that this is a small dot in the corner, but my site was not even listed as a threat a few months ago, so it’s all about baby steps.
Immediate Goal for Organic Traffic
Right now I’m on pace to grow my organic monthly traffic by 66%. For transparency, I drove 2k visits in November, so I’m on pace for 3.5k for December. This 3.5k monthly traffic is an achievable goal, so I’ll let December play out and assume I’ll hit that 66% growth.
Next Goals for Organic Traffic
If my site can generate 3.5k monthly visits, I expect January to get close to 4k. The reason why the traffic may not grow another 66% is due to the football season coming to a close, so may fans won’t be searching for parking information for their teams once they are out of the playoffs.
While football comes to an end, I look towards the NHL and NBA to make up the slack with parking traffic. I wrote all NBA and NHL parking pages in October, November, and December, so now it’s if my rankings will improve in time to drive traffic in January. If my keyword rankings get to page 1 of Google and Bing, I should continue growing in traffic heading into the baseball season, but there is a chance my traffic stays flat.
Affiliate Goals
I use Google AdSense on my site along with SpotHero for affiliate marketing. I won’t share how much I’ve made off either platform, but the revenue keeps growing each month which is key. I’m running a loss regarding capital put into the site and hours worked in 2019, but this is a long-term investment.
2020 will experiment with a ticketing platform and or Amazon affiliate ads on the site. I’ve not used either platform in 2019, so this will be another learning curve for me. If my organic traffic can continue growing, I believe I can drive additional revenue to my site from other affiliate platforms in 2020 and beyond.
Next Post
When 2019 comes to a close, I’ll write a more in-depth post with a PowerPoint and video presentation going over my niche website for the year. Stay tuned for that post!
If you are looking for a Free SEO Analysis of your site, you can check out that link. I’ve been offering SEO Expert Services professionally to a handful of clients in 2019 and look forward to working with you next year!