How would you rate the progress of this website?

[Hanuman]

I started a site in a lifestyle category that is a little generic in nature - that is, I wrote on a number of different products that are not all the same category. I had the idea that since they are long-tail, and not very competitive, I had an opportunity to reach a wide range of audiences with this strategy.

I have since learned that sites that are tightly aligned to one specific niche tend to do better since Google has a better grasp on what your site is about.

I do not have plans to abandon my site's strategy already since there is a decent traction since I started. But I want to hear from you if this seems good enough.

Site launched - end of April (domain must have been purchased a couple of weeks earlier)

Analytics (search - landing page clicks)

I have around 140 articles published already. Only half of it is crawled and indexed. I am sure traffic will keep going up. But I want to benchmark my keyword research success.

I am curious how much traffic did your site get in this time-frame. Is this on-par or much worse?

 

[bernard]

Not a lot to go by here, I get a sense, that this is one of your first sites?

In any case, I would suggest linkbuilding and outreach, see what happens in 6 months. Sell it if it doesn't take off.

I think for your first site, you should definitely niche down and brand yourself properly.

It should a niche in which you can position yourself and your site as "the nerds" in that niche or better yet as the "cool, passionate" guys in that niche.

The reason is that making a general lifestyle site like you mention here, just isn't going to be very interesting from a user perspective.

Why should someone land on your page researching a specific robo-vacuum and then jump to reading about mole removal?

On the other hand, if you niche down, you get people reading 1-2-3 pages and getting good page metrics.

So yeah, get some links to your site, see how Google treats it and in the meantime find a niche and topic you can see yourself become an "amateur expert" in.

 

[L900]

But I want to benchmark my keyword research success.

I am curious how much traffic did your site get in this time-frame. Is this on-par or much worse?

I'd say you're on par - but others on here might be able to comment further.

This answer from Ryuzaki might also help:

But it sounds like to me you're trying to make decisions way too early. 3 months isn't enough time for Google to react to a new site and not enough time for them to give you actionable data back yet.

 

[calinel]

If those clicks are organic, I would say that things are looking good.

It also depends when you posted those 140 articles. If most of them were posted in the first month (which I doubt was the case), you might want to see more traffic. But if you published them in a more evenly-split way, then I would say this is normal for a new site with low competition keywords.

In terms of how much traffic others get in the same time frame - don't even look at that. So many things can influence the amount of traffic and its quality.

For example, you might be able to get a website in the gaming niche to 30k sessions (or even more) in 1-2 months in a not-so-evergreen niche. But a blog talking about luxury products in a specific niche that's highly competitive... a lot less.

As long as your keyword research is good, the content you publish is high quality, keep up what you're doing and you'll see the hockey stick in a couple of months

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'd reckon that your growth rate is a little slow, given that you have 140 articles up. The fact that only half is indexed should be a huge sign to you that there's an issue, which is likely a lack of page rank and spider entry points into your site from out there on the web.

You need the other 70 articles indexed and aging pronto. And the page rank will help boost the ones that are already indexed. Even under the throttling / sandbox that goes on I'd expect more traction than that at four months.

Then again, I don't know the exact niche, what kind of keywords you're going after, etc. There's not enough info to give you a fully confident answer, but I can be confident in that you need more links based on the indexation problem. You may have low trust being only 4 months old, but you can increase that by showing Google other sites trust you enough to link to you.