So, it’s been nearly three months since the site was launched. Content continues to be added every day and there have been a few design / coding tweaks to make things look a bit slicker and run a bit smoother. However, over the last month and a half or so, the site has been plagued by the dreaded ‘Google Dance’. While the true Google Dance of old is no longer with us – Google now index their sites constantly – it is still a term that’s used to describe the immensly frustrating period when a site jumps up and down in the search results for your keywords. For a few days we’ll be on page one for “the hunger games audiobook” for example, and the next couple of weeks we’ll be on page 55 for the same term. Apparently (and I hope this is the case) this sort of activity isn’t uncommon in the first few months of a site’s lifespan. I just have to console myself by adding more content and hoping that things will level out in their rightful place in due course. I have to do all this whilst fighting the temptation to constantly stare at Google Analytics, praying for a sign of an upward spike in search traffic.
They say a picture paints a thousand words, so below is a screengrab of the search traffic for AudioLiterate. As you can no doubt appreciate, these graphs can be pretty disheartening.
As a way of getting over the Google Dance blues, I’ve also been paying quite a lot of attention to the creation and marketing of YouTube videos for the audiobooks. This has actually filled the gap in traffic quite nicely. I’ve now manged to rank one of my videos (again for the keyphrase “the hunger games audiobook”) in position one of page one on Google (above Amazon even!). Just this one video is bringing in 50-100 unique visitors per day which is great.
Below is a graph showing the traffic that I’ve been getting from the few YouTube videos I’ve promoted through the channel www.youtube.com/audioliterate
I’m pretty happy with the way things are going overall. The site seems to be being received very well by everyone who stumbles across it. Just got to keep plugging away and hopefully the site will come out of this dreadful Google Dance soon!