Photo Illustration by Mike Valentine © 2022

Article by Noah Levy

When I first started working in SEO blog writing, I had a little addiction: I’d check my Google Search Console stats every single day.

While being on top of your stats isn’t a bad thing, if you worry too much about daily stats you’ll give yourself anxiety that can be avoided in the first place.

In this article, I’m going to show you why I no longer worry about daily stats with an example of my site’s own SEO.

Why Daily Stats Matter Less Than the Bigger Picture

It’s easy to conflate not caring about your daily stats versus not making a big deal of them. Of course, I care about my daily stats. Wouldn’t it be worrisome if, all of a sudden, my site’s impressions went down from 1,800 to 1,300 a day? Alternatively, wouldn’t it be victorious if my daily stats went up from 1,300 impressions to 1,800 a day?

Both of these things have happened to me. Within one weekend (Dec 31, 2021 – Jan 2, 2022), my site’s daily impressions rose from 1,641 to 2,227.

Less than two weeks later, however, my site’s impressions dropped from over 2,500 to less than two thousand in a matter of days.
 

Screenshot and modifications by the author, Google Search Console.

I didn’t do anything drastically different with our SEO blogging strategy at SalesPipe. We kept on blogging for keywords that mattered to us, such as outbound SDR. We didn’t remove any content from our blog, either. So why did we seemingly get punished in our daily impressions?

We can also ask ourselves the flip side of that question: why did we get so many daily impressions to begin with?

The answer to these questions is virtually not answerable. The reason why is that we don’t fully understand what Google’s algorithm is doing. Part of having a winning strategy in SEO (really, in anything) is understanding the parameters of what’s in your control versus what’s not.

When it comes to blogging for SEO, there are only three things that we can do…

• Do loads of keyword research. This is the process of going on research platforms like Semrush and seeing what your buyers are searching for on Google, how much monthly volume there is for that keyword, and how difficult it is to rank for that keyword.
• Blog SEO-optimized content for those keywords. Write articles that have your target keywords appear frequently, have good images and infographics, cite solid data and their external sources, etc. Make sure your articles are much better than whatever ranks number one.
• Get backlinks for those articles. This is probably the most difficult step – you need to convince other sites to hyperlink your articles onto a webpage of theirs. The best way to do this is by giving them value: offer to write a free blog post in exchange for backlinking your articles.

Other than that, I can’t think of things that you can do to optimize your SEO blogs. You can go back to your older content and work on optimizing that if it’s not up to page-one standards. Maybe you can increase the word count by 500 more words, add two infographics that should be there but aren’t, and more.

But really, is there anything else you can do to rank for the first page on Google?

Nope.

And that’s why it doesn’t make sense to worry about daily stats.

SEO is like the stock market. There are many more factors that are out of your control than are within it.

Someone could’ve written a blog on your keywords better than yours, Google could’ve changed their algorithm to favor certain factors higher than others…the list goes on and on.

In fact, Google had more than four thousand changes to their algorithm alone for their search engine in some years.

So stop beating yourself up for things that are out of your control.

If you’re writing the best content possible while getting backlinks for that content, you’re already doing the best you can.

Finally, you must consider the bigger picture and what it looks like before worrying about your daily stats.

For our SEO at SalesPipe, we had only 3,600 impressions ever in its four-year-long existence as a domain on the web. That was the number before I started working on our SEO.

Today? We get nearly two thousand impressions a day, surpassing that 3,600 number every two days. Plus, we’ve gotten nearly half of our leads from our inbound SEO blogging strategy in 2022.

Although our stats fluctuate on daily basis, that doesn’t mean we are doing poorly. The stats of today are simply a pixel in the bigger picture of our standing. And we’re standing pretty tall.

The next time you beat yourself up for having bad daily stats, consider everything written above. It’s best to think of the long-term rather than the short.

Noah Levy is a co-founder of FoundCopy and the Head of Content Marketing at SalesPipe.