This covers the end of month #5 of our SEO case study covering an expired domain.
This was a productive month, publishing around 210 posts (to nearly 800), and we recently got in a good productivity groove publishing 10 posts per day.
February 2023 Stats
Traffic was up, with sessions (“entrances”) getting to 28,647, up from 24,681 in January. February, of course, is also a shorter month than January.
By the end of the month, we were almost doubling the daily rate of pageviews compared to a month earlier. We were getting around 1,500-1,600 sessions per day, or close to 1,900 pageviews per day.
That puts us on a run rate of nearly 50,000 sessions per month, which would qualify for Mediavine (the basic goal of the site).
Indexing
Indexing with Google is still an issue. We had only 15 articles indexed last month (in terms of the net).
Search Console Impressions
Impressions are low and Google is barely paying attention. This is normal for a new website, so hopefully we get out of the so-called sandbox within a few months.
All Bing, No Google
As we mentioned in previous posts on this case study all the traffic (more or less) is coming from Bing rather than Google.
Bing uses IndexNow, so the indexing is super-fast. Posts literally get indexed in about 15 minutes and start picking up traffic within about a day.
It’s nice to see we can get a site into Mediavine traffic territory (50K sessions per month) with no Google and no social.
Then, of course, if Google does come through the site has much more upside.
Bing (and Bing-related search engines like Yahoo) is currently giving the site around 75 views per article per month.
Keep Publishing is the Goal
We plan on publishing at least another 600 pieces of content for this site. We might even double that (to bring the article count for the site to around 2,000) as there is a lot to write about for this niche.
It’s just a matter of considering the marginal benefits past a certain point vs. the benefits of moving to another project (and diversifying).
After a point, there is overlap between content and declining benefits when it comes to producing more.
But first things first, we need to hit the traffic goal of 50K sessions (doable over the next 30 days?) and get it earning a consistent income each month.
