This article covers month #7 of our SEO case study.
We published 430 articles, despite only working on the site for around 20 days.
This brings the total number of posts up to around 1,520.
April 2023 Stats
Views were at 95,000, which is up more than 70% from last month’s 55K figure.
The current traffic total would put it at a run rate of around 110,000 views per month.
Indexing
Some posts got indexed, but there is a great lag between what’s published and what gets indexed.
Only about one-third of the articles are indexed on the site.
Bing has IndexNow, so we generally start getting traffic on posts from Bing right away.
Search Console
Impressions got a temporary boost for a few days (because of a single post) before falling back to less than 100 per day on Google.
So there’s some sort of filter at work.
On Bing, we’re getting around 40K-50K impressions per day.
This also doesn’t include Bing-like search engines like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, and other ones like Ecosia.
It’s actually kind of funny we get more traffic from search engines like Ecosia (which most people have never heard of) than Google.
Rejected from Mediavine
The site was rejected from Mediavine, which was the initial plan to monetize the site.
When asking why, they said something about the formatting of the posts.
I don’t know if that’s the real reason.
So we put the site on Ezoic…
Ezoic Monetization
The preliminary results from Ezoic have been kind of underwhelming.
It’s making between $12 and $18 per day.
The EPMV, which is just another RPM metric that focuses on users (so should be higher than a sessions RPM or views RPM) is also low between $3 and $5.
This is low for a site that has 75% desktop traffic (because it’s Bing traffic) and 60% US and 80% developed markets.
The ads on the site are also a bit overwhelming. Often more than 20 per page and not very interesting or relevant. Just random, low-quality stuff.
It’s a horrible UX, though we have to monetize the site somehow.
We were earning around $15 per day on Adsense before the switch with fewer ads (and more interesting ads).
AdThrive (Raptive) Views Eligibility Coming Up
Soon, the site will qualify for AdThrive (now known as Raptive) based on 100K monthly views.
If Mediavine rejected the site, then AdThrive inclusion probably isn’t a high probability, but we’ll try.
But the site should be earning better than half a cent (or less) per click.
Work on the Site Another 1-2 Weeks
We plan on working on the site for about another week, though it may go until the middle of May.
Originally we wanted to be done by the end of April before moving on, but we have other content that is useful to add.
We’ll never run out of content to write for this site.
But we also need to try other domains and new projects that have been waiting.
If Google traffic were to kick in or we could monetize the site better it would incentivize putting more effort into it in the future.
