A one-year SEO analysis of the blog

Three months after the blog launched, I published an article about the first audience results and the impact of publishing one article per day, but I didn't talk about SEO, and for good reason, that part takes time to set up.

In reality the blog existed before but activity was almost non-existent.

But today, after a year of daily content, more than 12,000 monthly page views and 250 published articles, I finally have enough numbers to present you an analysis of the blog's organic search performance, in complete transparency!

Evolution over 1 year

The graph above represents the evolution of the number of impressions and clicks on search results (Google) of the blog over a full year.

We can see two main things:

• Going from 0 to a few clicks per day took a total of 2 full months
• Going from a few clicks to a few dozen took 4 additional months

It therefore took 6 months total to reach a significant number in terms of SEO, it's a long process that you need to know how to work on over the long term.

For your information, 6 months is roughly the time it took me to reach 100 articles available on the blog, and it's from that stage onward that things started to take off.

In the graph above, we can see the evolution of the number of indexed pages (over the last 3 months) correlated with the evolution of the number of impressions.

In the context of a blog, we can clearly see the link between the two, even though the progression of the impression curve is slightly more significant than that of the number of pages.

Analysis over 1 month

If you look again at the evolution of the curve over 1 year, you'll see that the growth of the last few months is much more significant in terms of SEO.

The two graphs below represent respectively the performance in terms of SEO (Google Search), and the total number of visits (Google Analytics) on the blog over 28 days.

The total number of clicks (2.55K) brings in around 30% of sessions (8.05K) over 1 month.

And clicks over 1 month represent 40% of the clicks from the last 12 months, so the evolution is considerable.

CTR and average position

An average position of 22.5 is usually not an indicator of very effective SEO for a typical website, but the rules change when we're talking about a blog.

This figure is an average, which means that the more pages you have indexed, the harder it becomes for this average to go above a certain threshold.

To give you an idea, 150 articles have been clicked at least once through organic search out of a total of 250+ indexed articles.

When it comes to a blog with a lot of articles, it's not a problem to have an average position of 40, you just need to correlate it with the CTR (Click-Through Rate), in this case the blog's is 7%.

Based on the data provided by the Smart Insights website, a CTR of 7% would correspond roughly to an average position of 5 for a typical site, so a rather good score.

Keywords

Here is the list of the 10 most popular searches for landing on the blog:

1. kebab case
2. kebab-case
3. api gratuite
4. kebabcase
5. idée projet développement web
6. substack france
7. projet developpement web
8. différence entre framework et librairie
9. idée de projet developpement web
10. liste api gratuite

And here are the 5 articles that stand out the most, in correspondence with these searches:

In this top ranking, we therefore find 3 types of articles:

• Articles whose topic is popular but rarely covered (substack)
• Articles whose topic is fairly popular but for which a particular keyword isn't very commonly used in other French-language articles (kebab-case)
• Articles whose topic and keywords are popular but which managed to perform better than other similar articles

Of course, given how the blog is evolving, this ranking may change quickly, as some articles published a long time ago on the blog can get overtaken within a few weeks.