Dukes Avenue is a blog focused on travel and luxury lifestyle living for the modern professional woman operated by founder Sarah Borg Barthet.
Since my site is about explosive growth, let’s delve right into the web traffic. Since the beginning of 2020, Dukes Avenue has seen considerable growth in visitors throughout the year. As we can see from the chart below, monthly traffic has increased from 25 to 1800 in 12 months. Not bad at all.
Dukes Avenue is succeeding to grow audience share in a very competitive niche of travel, luxury lifestyle and fine goods through the use of great on-page SEO (search engine optimization).
While having a ton of backlinks is typically the holy grail for great page rank, Dukes Avenue has done exceptionally well with a minimum amount of backlinks. This site is living proof that Google love can be had with just well-designed content!
How to create a great travel blog and luxury lifestyle site
Table of Contents
Start off with quality lifestyle photography and writing styles
Duke Avenue succeeds by blending lengthy, informational content with transactional copywriting, complete with affiliate product placement.
What makes this work so well are the posts being more than just products dropped on a page and hitting the publish button.
Each post is well thought out, informative, and helpful to the reader. These are key points for anyone looking to increase on-page time and visitor engagement.
Also, the graphic design is consistent and balanced throughout the entire site. Very nice good of branding.
Sarah shows her command of SEO knowledge by creating content on an array of topics which all goes to support the overall travel blog writing and luxury life theme of the site.
Blogging with Google’s contextual based search algorithms in mind is the perfect strategy to use.
In recent months, Dukes Avenue has been increasing the amount of content and which has resulted in an increase in SEO ranked keywords.
Site traffic
DukesAvenue.com is quickly establishing itself within the lifestyle niche products and travel sector. It’s growing viewership is impressive. I can’t wait to check back with them next year to see where they are!
Load time
One item many site developers overlook is website load time. Google has increased its use of load time data when ranking sites. While content is still king, look for ways to improve the user experience as much as possible.
Dukes Avenue has a very good overall load time, coming in at under 2 seconds. Since many travel blog websites have a large number of images, being able to manage this is key.
If you’re using a WordPress site, be sure to try the Smush plugin to compress your photos. It’s a free plugin, with a premium option available for a site with a lot of images. Lifestyle photography sites tend to have larger image sizes within the articles, so I highly recommend it checking this out.
Mobile Responsiveness
Dukes Avenue was built using a responsive theme, which means it is designed to scale and display great on all platforms. I looked at the from a variety of cellphones, tablets, and desktops… perfect!
Quality of Content
I really love the look and feel of this site. The use of the Magazine anchor text is a classy touch to send you to the blog posts.
I enjoyed the variety of topics published. While I am not much of a traveler as of late, there are plenty of interesting reads here from getting spa treatments, how to pick out a good wine, plenty of luxury life topics, and more.
Great use of lifestyle photos! The graphic design fits the genre of the site to a tee, with a variety of images sizes and design layouts used throughout.
The boutique / in-site shop fits seamlessly into the site, which contains a great selection of beachwear, activewear, travel accessories, outerwear, handbags, wellness supplements, and well…. lots of fine products.
Frequency of content
Indeed, things are heating up at Dukes Avenue. A quick look at the site map definitely shows more content is being published with greater frequency.
Sarah is staying quite busy lately. Since it appears she is the sole content producer, the workload is quite large. Great job!
Length of content
For those interested in increasing your post rankings in Google, the length of content is a biggie! Sarah is consistently hitting the 1500 – 2000 word range. Perfect.
The general consensus on the optimum length of content is that your posts should at least 600 words for the best rankings, and if you could can hit 2000+, that’s even better.
Search Engine
A snapshot of indexed pages with the top search engines, Dukes Avenue can build on its growing momentum as more pages get indexed within Google. Since there has been a large amount of content created on this site recently, a couple month’s time should see these numbers increase significantly.
Final Thoughts – Dukes Avenue
All indicators are pointed in the right direction for Dukes Avenue. While we all want traffic to our sites the next day, the truth is most overnight successes were years in the making. I can see Dukes Avenue growing several multiples from its current audience size in the not so distant future. A key component for success is having a founder/operator that is not only energized but also has a strong understanding of how to grow organic traffic. Well done!