Theory: The 5 phases of SEO websites

[bernard]

Over the last 3 years, I've owned several websites and seen them grow from nothing to something, then take off, then stagnate, then decline. From observing this happen, I posit a theory for the trajectory of a typical SEO driven website:

Phase 1: Observation

The first phase for a brand new website is one of uncertainty, for the webmaster and Google alike. In this phase, the site is very new and without a track record. For this reason, Google seems to have difficulty judging the quality of the content and rankings might be wildly off in either direction. You might rank for some term you never intended and not be in top 100 for your best in class content.

There's little you can do to avoid this and speed things up.

This phase lasts from 6 months to 1 year, depending on how much work you put into outreach and trustbuilding.

Recommended action: Content Production 80%, Linkbuilding 20%

Phase 2: Trust building

The second phase of the SEO driven website is what I call the trust building phase. In this phase, which usually happens around month 6 to month 12, Google has properly categorised your website, both in terms of topical relevance (which terms and categories to broadly rank for) and in terms of user engagement (which bonus to add or detract) based on random spikes of traffic sent to your site.

You might discover that you are ranking worse for some keywords than in Phase 1, but this is actually a more realistic position. What Phase 1 showed you is what topical terms and keywords, you could pursue and rank well for, if your site had more trust. That is because in Phase 1, you are judged mainly on your onsite factors, because as a new site, you don't have any offsite factors.

In this phase, you are judged more on what happens offsite. Your links, your mentions, your various indecipherable EAT stuff.

Recommend action: Link building 60%, Content Production 40%

Phase 3: The scale and go

The third phase, which usually happens between 18 to 24 months is what I call "scale and go" phase. Because you established trust in Phase 2, your site has now finally reached trusted authority status in Google and new content will no longer be subject to long checks before ranking.

In this phase, you can launch content and have it rank page 1 on the same day.

This is the phase that the webmaster wants to be in, because there is a quick and direct connection between work output and earnings input.

Scale and keep going.

Recommended action: Content production 90%, Link building 10%

Phase 4: Maintenance

Eventually the mature website reaches phase 4, typically around the year 2 mark. At this point, the website is predictably earning, but growth is slowing down. Most keywords have been used and pivoting into related verticals doesn't seem to have the same effect. You're stuck in your niche and Google doesn't seem to reward branching out.

This is a phase that I think many affiliates recognise.

The rational approach in maintenance phase is to ... maintain. Do not do crazy things, keep the money coming in, and the optimise expenses and time spent. Get another years worth of stable income.

Is it time to sell?

Recommended action: Sell 50%, Keep 50%

Phase 5: Go big or Go broke

The final phase of the SEO driven website is what I call the "Go big or Go broke" phase. In this phase, the mature website, often 3 years or older, begins to stagnate and often decline.

The design looks outdated, the content isn't fresh, the owner has gone on his third vacation this year and while the site is still the big animal that the young animals want to kill, it is beginning to show a limp in its stride.

Given time, the site will decline. Slow at first, then faster, until a few years later, it might have lost most of its traffic and now stands only as a "has been" of a website, stuck in a previous time, mocked for its outdatedness and obvious commercialism.

To avoid this phase, the webmaster must decide. Should he sell the site like suggested in Phase 4 or should he use his leading position to move into a big brand setup.

If he decides to keep it, is it time to hire staff? Bring on partners? Launch own products?

Recommend action: Bring on partner or hire staff 80%, vacation in Thailand 20%

 

[adammc]

Very well put. I think this is a common trajectory for many smaller affiliate sites as there is a very real ceiling to how far they can grow.

Once you hit that ceiling, the ROI on anything more than basic maintenance is very small. They're also much easier to pass through phases 1 and 2.

This is why it's very important to choose your domain wisely in the early days and not pen yourselves into a too limited niche. For example, BestHuntingKnives is, theoretically, going to have a much lower ceiling than HuntingExpert/

I do think, though, that there is a lot of value in smaller sites establishing complete authority in a small niche. They can hang around for many many years.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Take the example of a site that dominates the "Vertical > Niche" of "Combat Sports > MMA". As you've said, you don't get the same respect and fast ranking that you're used to seeing once you try to roll out "Combat Sports > Boxing" and "Combat Sports > Wrestling".

Part of the issue people see when they branch out is that Google is capable of doing several things. They can assign you some sort of trust and authority metrics (for lack of better terms) for each niche. For MMA you might have tons of links and tons of posts and a lot of age in the .com/mma/ category. But you don't yet have that in the .com/boxing/ sub-folder. And it's not just sub-folders, though I do think that helps make it clearer for Google. They can figure it out by categorization and interlinking too.

So what I'm saying is, you need topical authority and when you roll out a new topic, you're almost starting over. You have the benefit of an aged site with aged links and plenty of content indexed, so you're not at ground zero. But you still have to overcome the new time-based hump related to the new topic.

I like your analysis here. I see Phase 4 (Maintenance) and Phase 5 (Go Big or Broke) as being the same. Your actions should remain the exact same as Phase 3 (Scale & Go) and you won't really have the issue of newbies encroaching on you because you're so far ahead with so many more links and age.

Phase 4 definitely happens when you start reaching a natural ceiling of growth with your existing content base. Growth appears to be slowing down for precisely the reason you said... webmasters slow down and the rate of content publishing slows too. You can add 100 more referring domains to a post that's ranking #1 for every possible term and it's not going to rank for more.

Of course there's other ways to grow, like conversion rate optimization and further exploiting your existing traffic. But to keep the traffic graph growing you have to be free from technical SEO errors and you have to keep producing spider-food, which creates opportunity for ranking for more keywords, getting more links and shares, and expanding your stranglehold on your niche.

And we're back to branching out to new niches in the vertical. You have to move fast so everything is aging together or early enough that you aren't seeing a reduced velocity of traffic gains from the previous niche yet. With enough speed, you can overlap the "topical traffic curves" so you never see a reduction in your growth velocity. Easier said than done, for sure.

 

[MrMedia]

An accurate overview in my experiences so far, give or take.

 

[bernard]

And we're back to branching out to new niches in the vertical. You have to move fast so everything is aging together or early enough that you aren't seeing a reduced velocity of traffic gains from the previous niche yet. With enough speed, you can overlap the "topical traffic curves" so you never see a reduction in your growth velocity. Easier said than done, for sure.

So you might want to branch out with a high quality pillar page in a different vertical early on?

If you're doing MMA gear, then branching out into "MMA vs Boxing" and "10 things MMA fighters can learn from boxers" and then add a "Boxing 101" and link to that?

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you're doing MMA gear, then branching out into "MMA vs Boxing" and "10 things MMA fighters can learn from boxers" and then add a "Boxing 101" and link to that?

I always advocate for searching through old content and seeing where you can interlink to new content. I think this would help too, planting the initial pillar article seed and then creating new posts in your previous niche that help gradually slide you over into the new one.

I always try to set up everything I want to cover at the start. These are made up numbers but if you know you'll have 5 main niches as categories, I try to fill each one with 10 posts or so at the start (the stuff users would expect to see in them). Then I let them sit and age as I work on one main niche. Then I jump to the next one.

Seems good to get some kind of base going in each intended horizontal niche so Google has plenty of time to understand them, see they're all in the same category, see they're interlinked. Then as you interlink them from other categories you'll increase the understanding (especially through anchor text).

It's an annoyance but I feel this kind of seed planting can save you time later once you get to that stage, even if it's years down the line. It also does a lot for making a site look bigger and more authoritative to the users landing on it.

 

[zentrader99]

I always advocate for searching through old content and seeing where you can interlink to new content. I think this would help too, planting the initial pillar article seed and then creating new posts in your previous niche that help gradually slide you over into the new one.

I always try to set up everything I want to cover at the start. These are made up numbers but if you know you'll have 5 main niches as categories, I try to fill each one with 10 posts or so at the start (the stuff users would expect to see in them). Then I let them sit and age as I work on one main niche. Then I jump to the next one.

Seems good to get some kind of base going in each intended horizontal niche so Google has plenty of time to understand them, see they're all in the same category, see they're interlinked. Then as you interlink them from other categories you'll increase the understanding (especially through anchor text).

It's an annoyance but I feel this kind of seed planting can save you time later once you get to that stage, even if it's years down the line. It also does a lot for making a site look bigger and more authoritative to the users landing on it.

Doesn’t it reduce the authority power of the primary focus niche in the first year?
Site A: 50 out of 50 pages about X1 niche and 100% of all links to X1
Site B: 50 out of 150 pages about X1 niche ( rest 100 about related but different niche eg X2, X3) . But 95% of all links point to X1 niche pages.

Even if proper silo is implemented in site B,won’t site A rank significantly better/faster than B?

Or the difference would be marginal?

 

[Philip J. Fry]

@bernard Interesting narrative but your narrative is only true for solo-entrepreneurs who are boot strapping development, design, content, and administrative tasks.

You can easily go 1.) observation, 3.) scale, 2.) trust and 5.) go big or go home by investing more capital upfront. This can be done by buying an expired domain, queuing up a few hundred or thousands of articles to writes on the day you buy the domain, which also takes a few days of keyword research, and doing massive amounts of link building on the day you buy the domain too.

So, in the observation phase, you're preparing the domain, administrating roles, delegating tasks, etc, which will then take place once the domain goes live. #3 and #2 can happen at the same time as scaling is on-page and trust building, in your definition, is off-page.

So, yeah, cool story bro. Maybe, for your next site, break out of this narrative as it seems like it's limiting your potential. Try a partnership? Try a non-affiliate business model? Try building a site for hire? If you just do the same narrative over and over again, you're just running the rat race once again. Your boss is no longer an actual person but the market, Google, and other webmasters on the Internet. It's still the same thing: a repetitive task that you do to earn a living.

Best of luck.

 

[bernard]

@bernard Interesting narrative but your narrative is only true for solo-entrepreneurs who are boot strapping development, design, content, and administrative tasks.

Yes.

So, yeah, cool story bro. Maybe, for your next site, break out of this narrative as it seems like it's limiting your potential. Try a partnership? Try a non-affiliate business model? Try building a site for hire?

Yes.

I'm currently doing a partnership on a 10 year old website we purchased with a declining, but still active community. Then I'm trying to do a lead generation website for local biz. I also have a few freshly built sites on expired domains and with outsourced content. Then various code-heavy websites (much easier to promote).

Not sure what you mean by "building a site for hire", I assume you mean as a freelancer. That's not something in the works currently, but I do plan on coding a Wordpress plugin for affiliates.

So I am shaking up the "narrative" as you call it and trying a lot of stuff. We'll see what sticks and what doesn't. I still feel fairly certain that the sites built according to the method above will generate enough income to experiment with the other stuff.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Doesn’t it reduce the authority power of the primary focus niche in the first year?
Site A: 50 out of 50 pages about X1 niche and 100% of all links to X1
Site B: 50 out of 150 pages about X1 niche ( rest 100 about related but different niche eg X2, X3) . But 95% of all links point to X1 niche pages.

Even if proper silo is implemented in site B,won’t site A rank significantly better/faster than B?

Or the difference would be marginal?

This type of logic makes sense if you're thinking about "topical flow" or something and treating it as a theoretical type of page rank juice. We're almost trained to think about things in that way, with words like optimization, saturation, dilution, etc.

It's what I feared about doing this too, but observing sites ranking in the SERPs led me to go forward with horizontal expansion under one broad vertical, and in my actual experience it works out just fine.

That's what I was talking about with sub-folders, or at least categorization of posts. I know for a fact Google can assign various metrics and values to sub-folders, categories, and even authors on a site. So as long as you provide a means to contain the topical authority, it shouldn't be diluted.

 

[secretagentdad]

I think your concept is correct but your timeline is elongated and you're tying a few more things to the calendar than you should.
I do think you're 100% right about there being a time component where google is collecting metrics on you. They gotta stack rank with something and most comparative metrics they can use only emerge on a timeline.

To proceed to the next category blow up the metrics in their timeline competitions and what ever other up other scores they're keeping and accumulate enough score to get allocated some rank potential. (to steal a word for ccarter)

Over the last 3 years, I've owned several websites and seen them grow from nothing to something, then take off, then stagnate, then decline. From observing this happen, I posit a theory for the trajectory of a typical SEO driven website:

Phase 1: Observation

The first phase for a brand new website is one of uncertainty, for the webmaster and Google alike. In this phase, the site is very new and without a track record. For this reason, Google seems to have difficulty judging the quality of the content and rankings might be wildly off in either direction. You might rank for some term you never intended and not be in top 100 for your best in class content.

There's little you can do to avoid this and speed things up.

This phase lasts from 6 months to 1 year, depending on how much work you put into outreach and trustbuilding.

Recommended action: Content Production 80%, Linkbuilding 20%

I don't think it takes this long any more though historically I woud have agreed with you. They run experiments really fast now. My experience the last few years is you put up a new site, push some brand words and link signals to it. It pops around randomly for 4 months tops right out of the gate and then either starts picking up real keywords or drops off.
(I guess this is where you identified phase 2 to an extent)

Phase 2: Trust building

The second phase of the SEO driven website is what I call the trust building phase. In this phase, which usually happens around month 6 to month 12, Google has properly categorised your website, both in terms of topical relevance (which terms and categories to broadly rank for) and in terms of user engagement (which bonus to add or detract) based on random spikes of traffic sent to your site.

You might discover that you are ranking worse for some keywords than in Phase 1, but this is actually a more realistic position. What Phase 1 showed you is what topical terms and keywords, you could pursue and rank well for, if your site had more trust. That is because in Phase 1, you are judged mainly on your onsite factors, because as a new site, you don't have any offsite factors.

In this phase, you are judged more on what happens offsite. Your links, your mentions, your various indecipherable EAT stuff.

Recommend action: Link building 60%, Content Production 40%

I would be willing to bet money you and a lot of people on this site could skip or massively shorten this phase and phase one with stronger branding and more focus on generating trends with your marketing. We seem to have a publish more articles ignore everything else mentality in this community. Sometimes I feel like I'm just the local contrarian when I see everyone talking about writing 100s or thousands of articles per site.
When my sites act this way I turn them into 301s and try to rebrand or just bail. Why invest in losers.
You can do the whole bag of cheap tricks for boosting brand metrics or just muscle it with media spend and messaging designed to push box queries related to your brand.
You can contrive your content to cause people to google things. If you originate keywords they are really good at attributing them to you.

Phase 3: The scale and go

The third phase, which usually happens between 18 to 24 months is what I call "scale and go" phase. Because you established trust in Phase 2, your site has now finally reached trusted authority status in Google and new content will no longer be subject to long checks before ranking.

In this phase, you can launch content and have it rank page 1 on the same day.

This is the phase that the webmaster wants to be in, because there is a quick and direct connection between work output and earnings input.

Scale and keep going.

Recommended action: Content production 90%, Link building 10%

I don't think this is a time phase you just have not exhausted your ranking potential by hoovering up all the good keywords yet.

Phase 4: Maintenance

Eventually the mature website reaches phase 4, typically around the year 2 mark. At this point, the website is predictably earning, but growth is slowing down. Most keywords have been used and pivoting into related verticals doesn't seem to have the same effect. You're stuck in your niche and Google doesn't seem to reward branching out.

This is a phase that I think many affiliates recognise.

The rational approach in maintenance phase is to ... maintain. Do not do crazy things, keep the money coming in, and the optimise expenses and time spent. Get another years worth of stable income.

Is it time to sell?

Recommended action: Sell 50%, Keep 50%

I don't think this is a phase. They just have some weird shit they did to force categories on people so people would stop churning out e how clones. It was a huge problem and ruining their search engine for a few years. Dude who started ehow named his yacht " The adsense" or something like that.

I think its totally a thing but its just an artificial cap they place to prevent the above.

Phase 5: Go big or Go broke

The final phase of the SEO driven website is what I call the "Go big or Go broke" phase. In this phase, the mature website, often 3 years or older, begins to stagnate and often decline.

The design looks outdated, the content isn't fresh, the owner has gone on his third vacation this year and while the site is still the big animal that the young animals want to kill, it is beginning to show a limp in its stride.

Given time, the site will decline. Slow at first, then faster, until a few years later, it might have lost most of its traffic and now stands only as a "has been" of a website, stuck in a previous time, mocked for its outdatedness and obvious commercialism.

To avoid this phase, the webmaster must decide. Should he sell the site like suggested in Phase 4 or should he use his leading position to move into a big brand setup.

If he decides to keep it, is it time to hire staff? Bring on partners? Launch own products?

Recommend action: Bring on partner or hire staff 80%, vacation in Thailand 20%

I think this happens from more people entering your verticals and winning Googles various mini games. I also think google does some sort of shit to give new entrants some kinda ratio advantage to encourage more content creation. Also found deleting weaker content can really help if you start dipping.
Work on making sure someone doesn't outbrand you.
Sites with brand volume do not decay at all. Whether its from being sticky or cuz you're running tv ads to make people look it up. I am 10000000000% sure about this one.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

So I am shaking up the "narrative" as you call it and trying a lot of stuff. We'll see what sticks and what doesn't. I still feel fairly certain that the sites built according to the method above will generate enough income to experiment with the other stuff.

Your post was a narrative. It's not my terminology but a generally accepted term. A narrative explains the past, explains the present, and explains the future. It's a story about where we were, how we got to now, and where we're going. While all narratives are false, they're used to obtain understanding and make decisions, as a choice only appears to us, if we're aware that it's there. Your narrative is about the state of a webmaster's site and what he should do, during those stages, from creation to exit or professionalization. It's odd that your narrative is about an inanimate thing instead of the individual(s) who build the thing. I think, if you rework your narrative so that it's about the human, whose building a business, it'll be insightful for you.

Because your narrative is centered on a thing and it ends with exit or professionalization, I doubt that you could professionalize, as it'll involve a total reworking of your intellect, as professionalization would be about hiring, training, and managing a team, who together work on the business, which is totally human-centric. Your narrative was thing-centric. Therefore, rewriting your narrative so that it's human-centric would be helpful.

I also wouldn't make the narrative about a website but, instead, a business. While the affiliate business model, where traffic is obtained from SEO, is really simple, what you're really doing is running a business. Not viewing it as that would prevent you from perceiving business opportunities outside of the Affiliate site using SEO business model. I think this is another reason why your narrative ends where it did, as going beyond the affiliate site with SEO business model is something you don't know, or at least don't know well enough, to write about. Hence why you should rewrite it as a narrative about individual(s) who are building a business, that happens to obtain most of its traffic via SEO.

By getting new business experience, "shaking up the narrative," you can expand on the narrative that you've built, which should give you understanding and insight, so that you are able to perceive opportunities and make decisions, that weren't visible to you before.

Good luck.

 

[bernard]

I think, if you rework your narrative so that it's about the human, whose building a business, it'll be insightful for you.

I'll meditate on that with some booze tonight.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

I'll meditate on that with some booze tonight.

I thought about this some more and, while thinking about a narrative in terms of only the protagonist or the protagonist's team is very Ayn Rand-esq, which would be popular with this forum, you should think of the narrative in terms of society in general and your place within society and history. This will give the narrative a background and setting. This is from Hannah Arend and her ideas about the Polis and Action. I'll explain this in terms of a general meta-narrative and then explain it again in terms of business.

In Marx's narrative of capitalism, he opens with Feudalism and how Feudalism was a system that offered no upward mobility. Then came capitalism, which allowed for upward mobility but exploited the poor, by the rich. Marx then encouraged the poor of the world to rise up, to start a communist utopia, as it'll solve the problems of capitalism, at the determine of the wealthy.

Likewise, your business's narrative exists within a preexisting setting. It's how the market and society are before your business entered it. This would define how society, which includes your target audience, would perceive your business and this definition is relative to other companies in the market. It's only within this background that your business can begin. This is when your business first obtains product/market fit. If you're only an Amazon Affiliate site whose traffic comes from SEO, you're totally skipping this step; but, if your business is B2C, this is a major step that takes many revisions. The Amazon Affiliate business model already took care of this for you as the Amazon offering is well known and the items sold on Amazon already have product/market fit. You're just an entity promoting a pre-existing product on a well known e-commerce platform.

However, the most common objection to the Amazon Affiliate/SEO business model is that its totally reliant upon Amazon and Google. If Amazon changes its policies or Google changes its algorithm, most people who own these types of businesses complain. Therefore, it'll be good to broaden past this business model.

For your target audience, what are they discussing and how can your company enter that discussion, so that you'll be a source to turn to, in addition to reviews? For example, I owned this site that was pro-2nd amendment. I wrote some law articles and the law articles are referenced to this day, years after I've sold the site. Yes, this generates backlinks but, more importantly, this works because the company was aware of the discussion in society and contributed to the discussion in a meaningful way.

As another example, I did some PR work for a pretty big streaming site. Top 100 on Alexa. They get 10-15 news mentions every month through their public relations campaigns. They're sex positive and promote sex positive policies and social programs. They do publicity stunts to promote this and have a solid Rolodex of journalists who propagate their publicity stunts.

Within my current company, we're trying to figure out how to engage international travelers, who usually travel only once a year. We'll probably have to engage them with travel-entertainment shows or food and culture programs, since that's what's popular with that audience.

Anyways, I think you get the point. The narrative needs to be set within society and can't be just about yourself. That's egotistical and solipsism. What's more, that's also what prevents you from making it big in the first place.

 

[bernard]

Anyways, I think you get the point. The narrative needs to be set within society and can't be just about yourself. That's egotistical and solipsism. What's more, that's also what prevents you from making it big in the first place.

Yeah, I'm thinking about this a lot recently. Making it big, of course is relative. I've made a good income this year in absolute and relative terms. More than most people will every make in a year. The affiliate model clearly works.

I do want to find a project that energises people to work with me or promote the website without being asked. I have had a few such sites. One site was a hobby site, where I created various cool guides and took photos, videos, created maps and routes and such. It was widely shared. I only make about 4k a year from it in affiliate, but I could, if I had really pushed on, created some other kind of business from it, a webshop or a tourguide business or something else. I could have become a local expert in the news and so on.

I didn't know how to do it though, because I've never learned one thing about sales or brand building.

In any case, I got a business idea for helping out expats in my city, that I thought could be an interesting way to apply my SEO skills to a project, that is not only legitimately helpful, but also something I am passionate about.