As a content marketer who understands SEO, one of the questions I'm frequently asked is how many articles should be on a website before getting traffic.
There is no simple answer to the question of how many articles a website needs to start receiving traffic since each website is unique. While some websites may only require a few articles (30 - 100) to rank and generate traffic, others may need a much larger number (200+).
Additionally, sites operating in competitive niches may require a significant number of backlinks to rank effectively.
Here are some factors to consider
Domain Authority
Receiving high-quality links from relevant and authoritative websites can significantly boost a website's Domain Authority (DA), which is an important metric that predicts how well a website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, not all links are created equal, and receiving links from low-quality or irrelevant websites may harm a website's DA and SEO performance.
One of the biggest contributor to DA is building off page SEO backlinks from relevant content websites.
Expired Domain
With what we know about domain authority, businesses can also purchase expired domain with existing domain authority in an relevant niche. The advantage of an expired domain is that the traffic can quickly build up without working on it as a brand new website.
The reason is that the search engine doesn't give trust to brand new websites until the site shows growth activities.
Keyword Difficulty
One strategy for improving a website's SEO performance is to focus on ranking for low competition keywords (KD lower than 5 - 10) in the first 12 months before targeting high competition keywords.
By targeting less competitive keywords, a website can build its authority without any domain authority. This basically means publishing as many content as possible to build up cumulative traffic. They add up very quickly.
As the website's authority and traffic increase, it can then gradually begin to target more competitive keywords, which can drive even more traffic and improve the website's search engine rankings. This process may take up to 1 - 2 years assuming massive amount of work is put into the website weekly.
In order to get traffic from competitive keywords with KD higher in between 30 - 90, a high domain authority is absolutely required.
Content Topics & Authority
When starting a new website, it's crucial to focus on creating the right content that people are actively searching for. Meanwhile, setup a topical authority plan to rank all semantically related keywords in your niche. This can be 300 - 500 articles about a specific topic.
By creating high-quality and relevant content that meets the needs and interests of your target audience, you can attract more traffic to your website and improve your search engine rankings.
This approach can be particularly effective in the first 12 months of launching a new website, and it's the hardest part.
Content Amount
Getting traffic is good, but getting the right traffic that leads to conversion is the ultimate goal. There are many informational content the website can publish, and their jobs are to get the traffic.
This can be as much as 3000+ articles on a website to get organic traffic. If you ever had a thought whether 15 articles is enough for a website, let's elevate that number to the hundreds and thousands.
However, wasteful content on the site that doesn't get traffic is a thing to consider. Delete them if they don't get 10+ session in 6 months. Having them on the site can negatively affect SEO performance and waste search engine crawl budget.
Please think about these articles targeting different topics at different perspectives that interest people. They are small entry ways your visitors can enter, and then lead them to the main stuff on the site that makes money.
On Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of individual web pages to improve their search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to a website. It involves optimizing various elements on a web page, internal linking, CTA, HTML tags, images, and meta descriptions, to ensure that they are relevant, high-quality, and keyword-rich. On-page SEO is crucial for several reasons.
On-page SEO can also help to improve the user experience on a website. By optimizing elements such as the content, images, and page load speed, website owners can provide users with a better experience.
Optimizing page depth within 1 - 3 clicks is one of the biggest element to ensure user can easily find the content on your website.
Internal Links
Having poor internal links on a website can result in bad crawlability for search engine spiders. This means that the search engine may struggle to find and index content on the website, making it difficult for users to discover relevant pages. As internal links help to establish the website's structure and hierarchy, they are an essential component of a website's overall SEO performance.
By ensuring that internal links are relevant, descriptive, and well-organized, website owners can improve the crawlability and visibility of their content, which can ultimately lead to higher search engine rankings and more traffic to their website.
Off Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the strategies that are used outside of your website to improve its search engine rankings and drive traffic to your site without search traffic. Here are some of the main things that off-page SEO can do to help increase your website traffic:
- Build High-Quality Backlinks: Backlinks are one of the most important factors in off-page SEO. A backlink is simply a link from another website that points to your website. It also pass traffic from existing website to your website
- Parasite SEO: This means borrowing ranking power from existing websites with high domain authority for pass through traffic. This basically involves getting a backlink from pages already ranking on the first page of search engine
- Social Media Marketing: Social media is a great way to get your content in front of a larger audience. By sharing your content on social media, you can increase its visibility, and as more people see it, there is a greater likelihood that they will visit your website.
- Guest Blogging: Guest blogging involves writing blog posts for other websites in your niche, in exchange for a link back to your website. This can be a great way to increase your website's topical relevance and domain authority. There are many hands off guest blogging services available like ABC Authority
- Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing involves working with influencers in your niche to promote your products or services. This is basically building backlinks and social proof in your niche