If you’ve got a new website with little to no content, then the answer is yes! That’s the short answer anyway.
You can spend countless hours trying to figure out what the best practices are. The truth is, it takes years to learn how to optimize a page perfectly and you need a healthy amount of content to work with to start the learning process.
Milestone: Your First Post
The first post on a website will likely never see the light of day. It’s important to get it published, regardless. Every post published on your site will begin the process of building a profile for what your site is about.
So pick something related to your niche and write a blog post about it. Make sure to write at least 500 words of content and make it easy to find the blog post using the site’s navigation.
Milestone: Ten Posts
Once you’ve published ten posts, Google will have a fairly simple understanding of what your site is about. If your pages were optimized decently enough, you may even start to see some keywords ranking in your Google Search Console.
You won’t start ranking right away. SEO takes time to take effect. It could be weeks or months before your posts start getting picked up for all kinds of keywords. But when they do, you can start playing around with optimization!
Lots of opportunities start to present themselves once you’ve collected enough data.
If you start to see keyword rankings, you can go back to your existing content and change a few things around to include these keywords. Since you’ve got several posts published, you can get started with internal linking! Get excited. This is huge!
Internal linking is one of the most effective ways to boost your rankings overnight. I talk a lot about internal linking, so be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter!
Milestone: 25 Posts
At this stage, you should already be getting traffic. How much traffic can you get with only 25 posts published? You bet I’m gonna say “it depends”.
There should definitely be at least 100 monthly visitors to your site. Even if your content isn’t optimized perfectly, you will rank for so many keywords that it won’t even matter.
The amount of traffic you’re getting depends on how big your niche is and how competitive your keywords are. With a healthy sized niche, you can expect to see 1,000 monthly visitors or more with 25 posts published.
Many blog owners benefit from ranking unexpected keywords that make up for more than 80% of their total traffic.
On one of my sites, I started to rank for a keyword I hadn’t even thought to target. It wasn’t until that single keyword started bringing hundreds of visitors daily.
Continue Posting and Learn Optimization Simultaneously
The more content you publish, the more keywords you’ll rank for. As you faster you will become at producing more content. As you begin to observe how keywords get ranked, you’ll figure out the small tweaks and changes you can make to grow your ranking positions and traffic.