Years two and three had some steady growth and then years three and four had a little bit more growth in the prior year. But overall, what I've done side by side for you here is I've actually shown you how many words I've published at this point in time in June every single year.
https://graphicriver.net/item/phoenix-logo/38111181
So what you can see is that in June of the first year, I had close to 191,000 words published whereas in year two, this was getting close to 1 million in year three, it was close to 1.5 million, but a little bit short. And then in year four, we're closing in and we're actually a little bit past now 2 million words on this site. So what you can see just at a high level from this is that there's a pretty positive correlation in terms of the number of words that have been published along with the amount of growth that I experienced in terms of users on the site in that particular year. So now that we've had a chance to take a look at the growth over time at this particular website, let's talk about seven lessons or takeaways that you can apply when you're building your own websites.
The first lesson that I share with you is that SEO takes time. In fact, I have in a complete video where I dig into how long it actually takes to see SEO results. But the long story short is that it can often take between six to nine months of a piece of content being released before you start to see the fruits of your labor for releasing that post. So what you can tell from this four year case study is that it's taken a lot of time in order for this traffic to grow. It is still not even at the point where it's over 50,000 users every single month. That's my next goal for this particular website.
But what you can see is that over time, as I've been adding more content, it has gradually been growing in overall authority as well as an overall traffic for the website. And this is including multiple algorithm changes through the years in which the traffic of the site has gone up and down, but all things equal when comparing year over year, my site has continued to grow.
The second key lesson from this is that you really should just focus on what you can't control. I've seen time and time again, some websites that go up and down in terms of organic traffic. And that's just something that you won't be able to control. We will never really know exactly what Google wants when they push certain algorithm updates. And so what you can focus on is creating epic content that is better than anybody else's and continue releasing content over time.
That's essentially what I've done over the last few years on this site, regardless of what month it is, there is at least 10 posts going out on this respective website. And when the numbers change or signal to me that things are picking up on a curve that's when I invest more on these websites so that I can then see if I can accelerate the growth curve.
But overall, what I'm focusing on more than anything else is, am I releasing more new content that is useful and valuable to my respective niche? The third lesson that you can take away from here is that you should really focus on playing long term games when you are site building. What I mean by that is you really need to zoom out from the typical tendency that you'll have when you're first starting out your website of checking your traffic every single day.
It really doesn't matter what happens today or what even happens in the week. What really matters is what's happening over longer time periods of several months or several years. And that's why what I'm showing you today is the year over year trends for a particular month snapshot of this website. You'll notice that if I were to just look at it week by week, I probably wouldn't notice any meaningful big changes that would've happened on this site.
But when I compare it year over year, I'm seeing massive changes that have happened for this website in terms of the overall size of the site, as well as the users on the site. And that third lesson naturally leads me to the fourth lesson, which is zoom out whenever you're feeling burned out. And the reason why this is important is because it really speaks to that last point I said, in which oftentimes we will get so in the weeds of looking at our traffic every single day or every single week, that we're not really thinking about how it's looking over a longer time period. And this was really key when you look at years one and and two and three and three and four.
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