Day 263: Organic Traffic and a Lot to Learn

Today I am blogging about my decision to open a blog about vintage speakers and the reasons that led to this decision. This blog, the challenge blog, does now exist for nearly 9 months and during this time I played with google analytics and figured out some changes that occured during the past three months.
About 96% of visitors during June 2011 (the month this blog went online) and November 2011 have been referrals from pokerstrategy.com, who either clicked on the link in my signature or used a link in the relevant thread. Since November 2011, the origin of my website traffic started to change. Have a look at the following pie charts of November, December, January and February.

Traffic in November 2011:

Nov. 2011: Referral traffic: 91,18%; Organic traffic: 4,71%

During the month of November, organic traffic (viewers that were linked to my website by a search engine, such as google) appeared for the first time. However, 92% of traffic is still coming from referrals (pokerstrategy.com). Some occurances of organic traffic exist before November, but those were mostly generated by myself, trying to find my own blog on google.

Traffic in December 2011:

Dec. 2011: Referral traffic: 77,97%; Organic traffic: 12,99%

During the Month of December, you can see how organic traffic rose from ~5% up to 12% and took over much of the share of referral based traffic. It is not clear to me yet what the medium (none) means. Is this traffic that typed the url directly into the browser?


Traffic in January/ February 2012:

January 2012: Referral traffic: 67,94%; Organic traffic: 22,22%

The described development continued during January and February and I am looking forward to see how the distribution of traffic will be in March. Organic traffic is now more than one third of my total traffic. Interestingly feed traffic did not exist before January and I am curious whether feeds will play a bigger role in the future.

February 2012: Referral traffic: 56,58%; Organic traffic: 32,56%

Considering the changing distribution of traffic that enters my blog I was curious what the reason for this development was. Looking at the keywords and the posts that the organic traffic looked at it became quite clear why more and more traffic is coming from search engines.
The common theme is that organic traffic has in about 98% of the cases searched for vintage speakers, the fisher speakers or the bose speakers, which I blogged about during the last months. During Fall, a short wave of traffic entered my website because of the keyword "Irene", after I posted 2 videos about hurricane "Irene".
Overall the blog got over 300 organic viewers during the last 3 months and so far the amount of organic traffic seems to continue to increase. The graph below shows the incoming organic traffic per week, starting last year in September, where the first organic traffic appeared and ending with the first week of March.

Increase of weekly organic traffic from October 2011 to now, March 3, 2012

Conclusion:
Based on this development I decided to open a Vintage Speaker Review blog which focuses solely on vintage speakers, their specifications and small, subjective reviews of them. Many of the organic traffic of my current challenge blog comes from pictures, as in particular my Fisher DS-826 speakers rank No.1 and 2 in googles image search, but also the pictures of my Bose speakers rank usually somewhere on the first page. Therefore, I will try to make many photos of vintage speakers, whereever I can find some. I will also review newer speakers and other "more vintage" audio equipment, as I already did with my yamaha RX-395 receiver. I read on several SEO blogs that it would usually take up to 3 months until organic traffic appears more regularly on a new blog, so I am going to be patient. I created a mental schedule to write one review at least every 4 days, if possible more frequently. As soon as I have about 10 to 15 reviews, I will start creating some backlinks in comment sections of other reviews about the same speakers.
I would assume that the organic traffic coming to this blog will rather decrease during the coming weeks/months, as I won´t post too detailed about speakers here, but on the new blog. However, I will keep posting anything related to the challenge here, which also includes the repair of the old receiver.

Furthermore, I am coming close to the minimum payout limit of google adsense. As soon as I reached that limit I am planning to invest the money into my first own webspace and a .com domain.

I´d love to get some comments about my thoughts here, as I am very new to SEO and all that. So please let me know if there are any crucial mistakes ;).