Small Site, Growing Advice?
 

I don't really want to give away one of the projects I'm working on, but I have a small niche site.

I apologize if the lack of details makes it difficult to answer this question.

Competition in my keyword targeting is decent; there's a few big boys in the industry dominating the serps as they should be.

My site is small and growing. Daily updates, etc, but I just can't seem to break the serps like my competition.

I'm on page 2 and sometimes page 1 for certain keywords, and actually doing quite well in that regard specifically, considering the age of my site being around 2 years. A lot of my "medium" competition is below me most of the time, but many are higher a lot of the time, pushing me back.

Theoretically, if I grow and keep adding to my site, should I become competitive? Say I grow to the size of my competition, does that mean I stand a chance? Say my content is just as good as theirs or better?

I've done no link building for this site, so my thoughts are focusing on the link building is a dumb idea for my particular site. I think quality of content is the best route to go. But what are your thoughts? Say you had any site that you wanted to grow, what obvious steps would you do to grow besides adding to your site daily, producing great content, and caring about the end user?

Thanks kindly, and yes, another business thread!

You can buy some traffic to it for pretty cheap.

Definitely focus on content quality and taking care of your users but know that the quality of your content alone isn't going to help you compete for search engine traffic so if this is your goal, link building isn't a bad idea.

Try to get creative and work around your keywords as much as you can and nail down lots of long-tail words and multi-word search phrases your competitors may not be going after. Also consider that your content may span more niches than you realize. I see a lot of Elevated X CMs customers make this mistake and they go after 1 or 2 extremely competitive keywords and ignore others that won't generate as much search volume but also won't have much competition...play the numbers game.

Also work on direct traffic via other sources relevant to your niche site e.g. adult forums, story sites, blogs, groups and fan sites and other sources that already have established traffic and search engine rankings of their own.

Good luck!

AJ

That is indeed a good foundation. In your OP you are focusing on Google, but there are other ways to drive traffic to your site - you'll also want to reach out externally with your brand.

-Social networking (Tumblr, Youtube, Dailymotion, Reddit, FB, Pinterest type stes, etc). Of course read the TOS and be aware your efforts can be taken down with no notice, but it can be a valuable part of your strategy.
-Contact other site owners, bloggers - depending on your project you could offer content, interviews, material for blog entries or articles, etc - trade them interesting material for exposure.
-Related forums. Be discreet - the idea is not to alienate users (and probably get banned quickly) with overt spam, but to just generate some exposure & interest over time.
-Be creative. The above are pretty standard but with a little thought there are other ways to increase exposure for a small site - you may not have a 100% success rate with your ideas, but the idea is to determine what works and then refine it.

You want to figure some ways to quantify the effectiveness of some of your efforts, but also keep in mind that improvements in brand awareness aren't always immediately noticeable - it's not completely about your hits/sales/ratio for that day or week, and IMO many small-to-mid-sized site owners lose sight of this.

IMO for most sites buying cheap traffic is a waste of time & money.

Feel free to PM me if you want any specific impressions/advice on your projects. Good luck!

yes soooooo right i was saying that
:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup