SEO Case Study: Month #4 (January 2023)

This is month #4 of our SEO case study using an expired domain.

In January, we added about 80 posts, bringing the total to around 580. We worked on the site for only about a week last month, so more progress will be done in February.

January 2023 Stats

We actually had a drop in traffic last month from around 29K entrances (sessions) to around 25K, or a fall of somewhere around 13%.

This was expected since Google traffic fell late last month.

Our top article fell in the rankings, and indexing of new articles has been super slow, so that’s mostly what accounted for the drop.

Flat trend in traffic all month:

Indexing Issues

There are around 600 posts on the site now, but only about 70% of them are indexed:

Indexing Issues

Bing Still the Source of Views

Bing is delivering traffic so far, while Google provided about only 40 clicks last month according to Google Search Console.

GSC Impressions and Clicks

GSC Impressions and Clicks

Given this was month #4, Google is basically treating the site as a new domain, not recognizing the old site, given the content was different.

Based on experience Google takes 6-7 months to kick in, so maybe by April or May we should see something.

Publish Content the Plan for February

We’ve already done keyword research for our next batch of content for the site. So now it’s just about getting the content live.

We think that we can never really run out of content ideas for this niche, but after around 1,200 posts or so, it should be in pretty solid shape in terms of being a “topical authority.” After a point, there are diminishing returns.

We simply need to publish content to get the site up to the 50K sessions mark to submit it to Mediavine and hopefully get it earning.

Once it’s actually on a good ad network and earning, then we’ll feel comfortable moving on to other projects.

New Projects in the Pipeline

We have two different niches that we’re excited about building sites on, so our goal ideally is to get started on them in about 2-3 months.

One of the sites will also be built on an expired domain (launched at the same time as this one) and what’s semi-exciting is we have one article on the site and it’s already getting around 600 views per month from Google.

We don’t know if Google will kill the traffic once we start publishing more and it realizes the site content is different than the previous iteration of the site (like it did with our case study site), but it’s a start.

What’s funny is that publishing one single article on that site is making it outperform the combined effort of nearly 600 articles on this site (400+ indexed) by 15x in terms of Google clicks.

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