This covers the end of month #6 of our SEO case study covering an expired domain.
This month, we published around 300 posts (our most ever for a single month), pushing the total to around 1,110 for the site total.
Our posts were also a lot more in-depth, so each should have better ranking potential. More words doesn’t necessarily mean more value or traffic, but there’s a correlation nonetheless.
And we saw great results search-wise as well in terms of growth.
March 2023 Stats
This month we had 54,994 sessions (up from 28,647 in February), an increase of 92% month-over-month.
If we adjust for the number of days in each month, that’s 1,774 sessions per day on average for March and 1,023 per day for February.
So, an increase of 73.4% m/m.
And we ended the month getting around 2,500 sessions or 2,600-2,700 pageviews per day.
There’s a little bit of a difference in the data between UA and GA4. GA4 is where all properties will be as of July 1, 2023 when UA is officially deprecated.
GA4 reports a bit higher and we display UA data above.
If we extrapolate the 2,500 sessions per day, that would be 75,000 monthly sessions.
We also submitted the site to Mediavine late in March, which was our initial monetization goal.
We will likely hear on that sometime in April.
Indexing
Indexing is still a huge problem.
Last month at the end we had 433 indexed. Now we have only 424 indexed.
Search Console Impressions
GSC impressions also fell.
The sandbox period can generally last 6-12 months.
We just finished month #6.
Usually, there is some traction before then to see if you’re going in the right direction.
If nothing improves by month #9 or so and the site is taking in revenue, we’ll have a professional SEO take a look to see if there are any technical issues.
As an aged domain, there’s old “dirty data” to fight through. The content is different form the original domain.
The site got Google traffic and impressions the first month before they collapsed. So that suggests that technically the site is okay.
But we’ll see.
This would be a very good website if the top search engine liked it.
If Google is 10x as popular as Bing, that would be a lot of traffic. Even if it only got 2x what Bing provides, that would be nice.
Bing Traffic Has Been Good
Considering that Bing is not even 10% of the search market as of this writing, getting 2,500 sessions per day from it is pretty good.
Granted, there are over 1,100 articles on the site. And 2,500 sessions on 1,100 articles is just around 70 views per article per month.
That’s low but better than nothing. With some brute force on the content creation, the traffic is now at a respectable level that should be able to theoretically generate $50-$100 per day passively keeping the traffic at this level.
Another thing to remember is that 70-75% of Bing traffic is desktop, so it has higher monetization potential versus the mobile-heavy Google.
Desktop monetization can be 2x-2.5x better than mobile.
Publish for Another Month Is the Plan
We won’t be able to work on the site for the whole month, but we should be able to put in a solid 3 weeks or so.
We’d still like to do another 250+ articles this month.
After that point, we’d like it to be at a run rate of around 100,000 sessions per month.
What could throw a wrench into the plan is if Mediavine turns the site down for some reason. There’s no reason why it should, but supposedly Mediavine has only around a 14% acceptance rate.
If it doesn’t, then the why is most important. The site, if it can grow another 20% or so, would also be within AdThrive’s minimums if that were the case.
New Project Coming Up
After that, we will need to start working on a new project.
It’s another aged domain and Google actually likes it. We have only a few articles on the site intended to rank and so far Google is giving it around 1,000 impressions per day.
The backlink profile of that site also doesn’t peg it to a certain niche like this site does.
So maybe adding more content won’t create the same sandboxing effect as this site?
We’ll write a case study on that site as well.
Keep Up the Site
As for this site, we will plan to keep adding to it in the future as well, because publishing frequency matters.
But it’ll be more like 10-30 articles per month instead of 200-300.
There are also marginal differences past a point, and there’s another niche that we need to start tackling, and there is benefit in diversification.
With the ad revenue from this site, instead of plowing it back into new web publishing businesses, we actually intend to put it into safer investments that aren’t dependent on a fickle algorithm. Much truer diversification than simply different websites monetized heavily with ads.
