How to Grow Your Blog to 10K+ Visitors (the ultimate guide)
This is everything I’ve learned from blogging, working in content marketing and doing SEO since 2020. This is exactly how I started and grew three of my own sites and the strategies used by my biggest clients.
This is how to grow your blog to 10K visitors — and beyond.
This whole post was actually meant to be a course, but I’m putting here as an ultimate guide for free. I’ve broken everything down into 6 parts:
[pt. 1] Setting up for Success
[pt. 2] Keyword Research
[pt. 3] Content Strategy
[pt. 4] SEO 101
[pt. 5] Blogging Schedule
[pt. 6] Reading the Data
[pt. 7] Mindset / Expectations
So let’s do this freaking thing!
Hey, just a quick heads up that some links in this post may be affiliate links. This is at no extra cost to you, but helps me keep the lights on. Thanks for your support!
[pt.1] Setting Up for Success
You know it, I know it, your friend's sister’s neighbor knows it – a bad foundation makes for a sh*t building. So this first lesson is all about setting things up for success.
Let's start with your niche selection.
Narrow Your Niche
If you haven’t yet, it’s time to choose your niche. To do that, it helps to dispel a couple myths.
First, no niche is too saturated.
And second, any niche can go too broad.
For example, the travel niche isn’t too saturated – but it is too broad. But travel in Thailand for solo females or expat life for families? Now that’s niche.
In my experience, the best niches tend to check off either one or both of these things (ideally both):
It’s something you have expertise in
It’s something you’re passionate about
It’s also important to stick to one niche if you want to grow your Squarespace blog and brand (through SEO) quicker. Getting to 10K visitors (and beyond) requires focus and topical authority around a single niche.
You can totally expand later and eventually build a multi-niche blog, but it helps to stay focused early on and first establish brand authority and trust one theme at time.
Creating high-impact offers, selling services and creating lead magnets are way easier when you have just one single, specific audience.
(trust me, I've made the mistake of going too broad with blogging)
Create Your Core Pages
It’s important that your website has all the important pages. Here’s how to create a new page in Squarespace:
Click on Pages under Website
Click the + button next to Main Navigation
Choose a page template or a blank page
Name your page and start building it
You can also create the page under the Not Linked section if you don’t want it in your main menu (but don’t worry, you can always move pages off the main navigation later).
As you build out your website, make sure you include at least these main pages:
Core pages:
Homepage
Contact
About
Blog
Legal pages:
Privacy policy
Affiliate disclosure
Terms and conditions
Extra pages:
Offer landing pages
Products / Store
Services
Explore more:
➤ The Key Parts of a Great Website
Customize Your Template
Customizing your Squarespace site means adding your unique branding and design to your template. Again, Squarespace makes this pretty easy.
You have tons of native elements (buttons, images, galleries, integrations, etc.), which you can add to any page or post. And you can easily customize any part of your design (colors, fonts, etc.) by clicking on the paintbrush icon in the upper right corner.
And if you’re looking for something extra custom, you can always buy a third-party plugin and add custom CSS (such as creating a table of contents box or a vertical main menu). I have a page on Squarespace resources with a list of tools and people to follow that's worth checking out.
As for customizing your headlines and body text, start by using your core brand keywords and tone of voice.
If you’re not sure what those are yet, don’t worry – my next email tomorrow covers my exact keyword research strategy.
So just try to get everything “good enough” for now and add some placeholder text if you don't have your brand keywords yet. It’s also helpful to check out other creators in your niche or use a site like Dribble for inspiration!
Explore more:
➤ Essential Squarespace Design Tips
➤ Squarespace Customization 101
Go Live
It’s best to not overthink stuff and instead, just hit publish. Waiting for the perfect design or the perfect content plan is a terrible strategy. The best way to actually grow and get better is to just start.
So hit publish, and go live.
SEO, blog content and building a brand all take time. And companies spend millions of dollars for exposure – so don’t worry, nobody is going to accidentally find you.
But the sooner you push your site live, the sooner you can get indexed and start building your domain authority. So don’t be an armchair creator!
During your free Squarespace trial, you’ll see a banner at the bottom of the page for you to take the next steps to publish your site live. Just click that button and follow the instructions – they make the process pretty intuitive.
You’ll be walked through everything, including:
Buying a domain (~$20/year)
Choosing a pricing plan
Adding your personal information
Setting up a professional email account through Google Workspace (which is free for the first year – then just ~$6/month)
Note: Make sure your website is set to public, not private. Learn how to check here. And once your site is live, there's just one more thing to do (well, for this first email) – connect to Google Search Console.
Connect to Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free web tool for monitoring your website traffic and keyword rankings. You can also request immediate indexing for new pages or blog posts (which can sometimes take many months for Google to do on its own).
So if you're serious about growing a website and blogging, you'll need to use GSC a lot.
It's super easy connecting to GSC through Squarespace:
From your Home menu, click on the ⚙️ icon
Click on Marketing
Click SEO Appearance
Click on Google Search Keywords
Log in to your preferred Google account
Review permissions and hit Allow
Wait 72 hours for data to populate
[pt.2] Keyword Research 101
In this section, we'll be covering my exact keyword research strategy, which is actually pretty simple.
This is how you find keywords that 1.) you can actually rank for, and 2.) will get you enough traffic to reach 10K+ visitors.
Trying to grow a blog without the right keywords is like trying to drive a car with the wrong gas(or without power). Keywords are the topics that shape your blog and build your credibility.
They're the exact-match terms that people are searching for online. So to get sustainable traffic, we need to know those phrases and then create epic, optimized content for them.
This is how you get real traffic and build authority.
So here’s my exact keyword research process (but you can dive a little deeper in this post):
Brainstorm relevant topic ideas
Only keep and choose topics that are in your niche
Use forums and threads for inspiration
Think about what your ideal audience wants to know
Keep an ongoing list for easy organization (I use a Google Doc)
Go to Google Search
Use Google's autosuggest to turn your topic idea into an exact match keyword
Start typing in your seed topic idea and look what Google suggests for searches
Play around with prepositions and other words to find additional keyword ideas
"blogging for..."
"blogging and..."
"blogging with..."
Long-tail keywords are also usually less competitive
Hit enter for your keyword and analyze results
What is the search intent?
What do the results look like?
What are other blogs talking about?
How can you write something better and/or different?
Get keyword data
Aim for low competition phrases with good search volume
Aim for <10 KD in Ahrefs or an Easy score in Semrush
Aim for 10+ MSV (monthly search volume)
*Note: don’t skip relevant terms just because they’re super competitive or don’t have any search volume. While you may not rank for them, if they’re relevant to your brand, they’ll build important SEO authority and credibility.
Add related keywords to each main keyword
Related keywords can help guide your blog outlines
Use the People also ask and Related searches in Google for ideas
Include synonyms, closely related phrases or alternative queries that have the same search intent – here are some related keywords for the target keyword of “how to start a blog”:
“starting a blog”
“blogging for beginners”
“blogging how to start”
“steps to starting a blog”
“guide to blogging”
*Be careful not to make different posts for closely related keywords – this leads to keyword cannibalization (when two posts essentially rank for the same thing, thus competing with – eating – each other)
Put yourself in your reader’s shoes – what subtopics would make sense for your article?
“examples of [keyword]”
“benefits of [keyword]”
“types of [keyword]”
etc.
And that’s pretty much my whole keyword research process! To dig deeper, check out this link here. Otherwise, go ahead and practice by doing some of your own keyword research and starting a keyword research document.
Also, don’t be afraid to develop your own methods and/or processes!
[pt.3] Use A Winning Content Strategy
A content strategy is how you organize, create, publish and promote your content. And having a clear and intentional content strategy is how you reach 10K monthly visits.
The core of my content strategy focuses on creating topic clusters. Topic clusters are groups of related topics that all support one central theme. Together, they build real authority and trust in your niche (i.e., better rankings and more traffic).
This is still one of the best traditional SEO ways to grow your website (to 10K and beyond). Build topic clusters out of brand-relevant keywords.
For example, let’s say you’re in the blogging niche. You would build a topic cluster by first creating a pillar page (e.g., The Ultimate Guide to Blogging in 2025) and then lots of supporting articles that interlink between each other and support this main pillar, such as:
How to Choose the Perfect Blog Niche
How to do Keyword Research for Beginners
The Ultimate SEO Guide for Bloggers
How to Build the Perfect Blog
The Best Ways to Make Money From Blogging
Essential Blogging Tools Everyone Should be Using
And as for publishing and promoting your content, we'll cover those things in later emails. So for now, try to organize your keyword document by pillar topics and clusters.
Explore more:
➤ Here’s My Full Blog Content Strategy
[pt.4] How to do SEO in 2025
This is how to do modern SEO.
What is SEO and why does it matter?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your content and website for search engines, user experience and online discovery.
And it's instrumental in growing a website and blog.
Because even if you find the perfect keywords and plan the perfect strategy, nothing will matter if your SEO is off.
Plus, SEO isn't what it used to be – it's changed.
Google’s algorithms have gone through major updates (ever since AI came onto the scene) and people are changing how they search and use the internet. All of this means that – as site owners looking for organic traffic – we need to adapt. Otherwise, reaching 10K monthly visits – and more – will be a whole lot harder (if not impossible).
So I see modern SEO as having four main parts:
The reader
The content
The technicals
The big freaking shift
Get these things right and you’ll get to 10K monthly visits (and beyond).
Let's start with the reader.
Explore more:
➤ SEO for Bloggers (full guide)
The Reader
This is what doing SEO for the reader means:
Going from “How can I get traffic and make money?” ➡️ “How can I actually, genuinely help the reader?”
This is how SEO should have always been (and it was in many ways). But a lot of us have fallen into the trap of focusing too much on SEO and not enough on the user. So our content was optimized for search engines, but not for humans.
Whoops!
It’s not our fault though. This is what worked for ranking, traffic and blog growth.
Now, with AI and major changes from Google and users, it doesn’t work quite as well (or at least, tides are shifting).
Now, we should aim to optimize for the reader more than for Google. Luckily, this is pretty intuitive:
Match the search intent of your readers (hold the extra fluff)
Create an amazing experience for your visitors
Write what resonates with your audience’s pain points, passions and values
It can be helpful to create a reader persona for your blog too. So each time you write, you have a very specific avatar in mind.
This will make your writing more impactful and resonate deeper. After all, if you try to reach everyone, you’ll reach no one.
Note: Sometimes search intent is obvious (e.g., “how to start a blog”). Other times, it’s up for debate. For example, does the term “music challenges” mean music struggles or ways to gamify the songwriting process? Check what’s ranking in Google for your answer.
The Content
Content-based SEO is the quality of your writing. Here’s what that means:
Having an intentional content strategy – only publish relevant topics and create content clusters
Infusing your authenticity – infuse your personality and unique tone of voice
Write high-quality blogs – write clearly and avoid fluff, add unique perspectives and leverage real first-hand experience
The more you write, the better you'll get. But always prioritize authenticity and honesty.
The Technicals
Technicals are the classic SEO advice that are still important.
Here's what that means:
Target keyword use. Use your keyword in your title (towards the front), somewhere in the first 100 words of your post, within the URL and in the meta description. From there, just write conversationally and naturally.
Related keywords. Use secondary keywords related to your target keyword in your body text, H2 and H3s. Look through the People also ask and Related searches of Google of your target keyword for inspiration.
Backlink profile. A backlink is when another site (with more authority preferably) links back to yours. It’s a strong signal to Google that your content is also trustworthy. This is great for SEO. Some ways to get backlinks include direct outreach, guest posting, being a guest on a podcast, meeting publishers at in-person events, or just creating high-quality, share-worthy posts.
Image alt text. Describe all of your images (many people use their target keyword here too). This is important for website accessibility.
Site speed. A slow site will ruin your SEO. I’ve never had a problem with Squarespace, but one way to ensure your site stays fast is to compress all of your images (I aim for at least <500 KBs). You can use tinypng for free.
UX (user experience). Make your posts easily scannable and your website simple to navigate. Avoid long-running paragraphs and too many CTAs; use bulleted lists, bold text and lots of (original) images. Make your UX kick ass!
SEO can definitely get more technical than this. But if you just get these things right, you’ll be most of the way there. And to be honest, I still ignore a lot of the other advanced strategies.
It’s like what the Pareto Principle says: 80% of your results come from just 20% of your actions.
The Big Freaking Shift in SEO and Blogging
The big freaking shift (as I call it) is what’s defining modern SEO. This is the answer to algorithm changes, new user trends and AI in everything. This is how to actually grow your blog in 2025 and beyond. This is the future of blogging.
For the big freaking shift, I’m focusing on these key areas:
Traffic diversification
Quality > quantity
Experience
Brand
Traffic Diversification
You don’t need to rely on Google SEO alone. In fact, you shouldn’t. This is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the past year.
Don’t put all of your traffic eggs into one basket.
Traditional SEO and ranking takes time. And frequent algorithm updates, changing user behaviors and SEO trends are all making it more and more difficult to rely on Google traffic alone.
So the best solution? Diversify your blog and brand traffic.
Modern blogging (love it or hate it) is expanding to include more than just articles on Google. For example:
Optimizing for Google Discover
Adding a Pinterest strategy
Using video and YouTube
Using more social media
Focusing on email
Podcasting
You don’t need to be everywhere doing everything all at once (and you shouldn't either – that'd be way too much!).
But it would definitely behoove you to add at least one extra traffic channel to your blogging strategy.
Trust me, I got slammed by Google's March 2024 core update. And overnight, I lost more than half my traffic and had no alternatives. It sort of sucked.
So now, I'm diversifying (like a solid stock portfolio).
Explore more:
➤ What is Social Blogging?
➤ Blogging vs. Vlogging (+ social media)
➤ Proven Strategies for Explosive Pinterest Traffic
Check out Guilhem Chauvin on X for tactics and info on ranking in Google Discover!
Quality Over Quantity
Content quality has always been important. But modern SEO and blogging is making this factor even more important.
It seems having less content (that's more relevant and of higher quality) is better than having more content (just for the sake of more content and hopeful traffic).
Put another way, blogging is moving away from a volume game to a value one.
AI sparked this shift.
Because when anyone with a free ChatGPT account can spit out a 2,000-word article on any topic, then something needs to change. And that’s been the catalyst of this shift.
AI-written articles tend to be full of fluff and don't usually add new ideas or contextual experiences to the conversation – so there's not a lot of novelty, personality or brand there.
This is good news for bloggers!
AI isn’t bad (especially for optimizing processes and research). But lean into the human element and quality of your blog posts. This is one of your greatest assets.
For example, reach out to other creators or people with expertise on the topic you're covering and include quotes in your posts.
And always use leverage your first-hand authentic experience.
Experience
Real, genuine, human experience is what’s winning in blogging and SEO these days. It’s what builds actual trust and authority. This isn’t new either – Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines have been recommending this for a while.
Because AI will never be able to capture the nuance of what it means to be human. Only you (for example) can hop on a plane, travel to Tokyo and eat a bowl of ramen at the perceived “best” restaurant in the city – all while dealing with a jetlagged brain. And that’s exactly what readers (and Google) want more of. Authentic human experience.
ChatGPT can’t do that for you.
So to be a successful blogger, you need to practice what you preach and fully embody your brand. Become your niche.
Experience is everything moving forward.
Brand
Brand is everything. It’s a serious buzzword, but don’t let that diminish its value. Building brand takes time, but it’s something that no algorithm can take away and no other person or company can replicate. Because nobody is you.
So here are some ways to infuse branding into your blogging and SEO strategy:
Define (and use) your personal brand keywords
Create and share unique systems and styles
Never try to be perfect – so unrelatable
Share your story and your journey
Develop a clear visual identity
Play the long game
Use social proof
Explore more:
➤ Branding for Creatives (build brand like crazy)
[pt.5] Your Blogging Schedule
We've covered a lot so far and we're getting close to wrapping this thing up. So today will be pretty short and sweet (but still critical). It's all about publishing.
Getting to 10K monthly visitors on your site is going to take a lot of content (if that wasn’t obvious yet). So your publishing cadence is an important element to think about.
Ultimately, your publishing calendar depends on your goals, lifestyle and preferences. But if you want to reach 10K as quickly as possible, then I would aim to publish 2-4 blogs per week.
But at least aim for 1 per week as a minimum (especially early on when you’re motivated and trying to establish base authority in your niche). You can always adjust your blogging schedule later.
But can you realistically publish 2-4 posts per week? This can be tricky, for sure – especially if you have another job or other responsibilities (like a family).
So here are some of my favorite ways to improve my blogging consistency and sticking to a high-volume publishing schedule:
Use an outline to write your blogs
Use templates for quicker outlining and planning
Avoid creative blocks – pull ideas from your keyword research document
Try micro-writing rather than trying to write a whole post in one single sitting
Create a blogging workflow that suits your lifestyle, strengths and preferences
[pt.6] Reading (using) Your Data
This section is super important and covers topics that I (embarrassingly) ignored for a long time.
Growing your site to 10K+ monthly visitors is more than doable. But to cross that threshold, you’ll need to understand three key things:
How to read the data
When and how to update posts
How to use the data to optimize things
Learn these moves and avoid blogging in the dark (like I did for too long).
Blog Data 101
Blog KPIs are data points that represent your blog’s performance. These are most of the blog KPIs I like to keep an eye on:
Bounce rate
Affiliate sales
Monthly traffic
Sessions per visit
CTR (click through rate)
Session (or dwell) time
Monthly newsletter subscribers
Your niche may have specific benchmarks (or data points), but evaluating your growth based on your own past performance is probably more important (IMO).
For example, a good CTR for your niche may be 3%.
But if your past CTR was 0.05% and you increased it to 1.5%, then that’s a win!
Perspective is crucial for staying motivated. So celebrate those small wins, they add up!
(after all, comparison is the thief of joy)
So, where do you uncover all of this juicy blog data? Here’s where I get most of my site performance KPIs:
GA4
Google Search Console
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
My newsletter software dashboard
Each affiliate program’s dashboard
Hotjar
If you really want to manage your data like a pro, you could create a spreadsheet to organize and track all of your metrics in one single place. This is a smart move, especially as you grow and your numbers start to get bigger.
Content Updating + Optimization 101
Sometimes, updating old articles and deleting ones that no longer make sense (aka content pruning) is more important than publishing new blogs.
Actually, I’ve spent most of 2024 doing this. I went through a complete rebrand (for my travel/lifestyle site) and I've spent months updating, deleting (with 301 redirects) and revamping hundreds of posts. My whole site architecture has changed.
Obviously, this is an extreme example of content updating. But it does highlight the importance of clarifying your niche as early as possible.
But even if you do have everything figured out, you’ll need to do some type of content updates eventually. It’s inevitable.
This keeps your site active and your content fresh. It’s also one of the best ways to get old posts that aren’t performing well to move up in the rankings.
Often, old articles are low hanging fruit. For example, posts you have ranking on page 2 can easily get to page 1 by just doing some light optimization and updating for new keywords, better information and improved UX.
This is actually a good signal of when to update an old post. If you have an article that's been underperforming for months without traction (but it's close to the first page results), try updating it with fresh content and keyword optimization. This can result in a lot of extra traffic.
Also pay attention to pages that have high bounce rates, low engagement and low session times (i.e., people exit quickly, don't interact and don't stay a while).
Try to better optimize your UX to improve those numbers.
Finally, pay attention to your posts that do perform really well. Double down on the themes, strategies and structures of your best performing articles.
Success leaves clues.
[pt.7] Mindset + Expectations
If you've made it this far, you're amazing. We covered a ton of information and I know how hard it can be to process everything if you're new. So just stay with for a little longer here. Let's talk about one more final piece to this site-growth puzzle: mindset.
It took me a long time to start hitting exciting milestones. And if I would’ve quit when things were boring, stressful or just annoying, I would’ve missed out on a lot.
Great things take great work and time. Blogging and growing a personal brand take time. So think in years, not in months.
Your mindset is everything. Consistency and a willingness to learn is the only thing that really matters. So practice thinking in the long-term.
Set realistic goals and have realistic expectations. Live in the clouds (for sure), but come down every once in a while to stay grounded too.
Be patient and become obsessed with the process (fall in love with writing and celebrate your small wins).
And finally, surround yourself with more bloggers and digital creators and consume more inspiring/educational content.
After all, I am only as good as the company I keep (and the content I consume).
So with that, happy blogging and good luck on your Squarespace site growth journey!
✌️
