How will I do it? With display ads. Getting on one of the premium networks and getting an average of $20 RPM, I would need an average of 5 million monthly visitors. My biggest competitor gets well over 1 million visits every month, and I intend to beat him in every way possible.
Hi! Long time lurker, decided to start my own journey thread for this grand plan of mine. I never wanted to be one of those SEO guys with a portfolio of 20+ EMD niche sites. But here I am, and my portfolio has tanked over the past 6 months, making me seriously question if SEO is dead. It is my belief that SEO is not dead, but we have to adapt and change a bit.
SEO
Very recently I started a tools website with massive potential (let's call it a calculator, not going any further into detail than this). My tactic is nothing new, at all. I will simply create the best website possible in terms of on-page SEO and page speed. For backlinks I will be focusing on high quality guest posts on related websites, possibly some HARO as well as link baiting with infographics and statistics.
The site is not built with a silo in mind, but I do have a maximum click depth of 2. This way Google crawlers and visitors will have no problem navigating through the website. All the important pages to boost my topical authority are linked to from the homepage as well. In the distant future the click depth will probably have to increase to 3.
Competitors
In terms of my competitors, they have been around for over a decade and I'm probably not going to get the top spot that easy. However, the market is so massive that I don't care if I rank #3-5 for most keywords in the beginning. My main competitor has a massive backlink profile, but I have a hypothesis I want to try:
While they have a lot of backlinks, most are from smaller sites, not necessarily even in the same niche. They don't have a single backlink from any of the major players in the niche, and that's what I'm going for. I want to see if I can beat them with fewer, but a hell of a lot stronger backlinks.
Keyword Research
Not much to say here. I don't use any tools, free or paid. The niche I'm in just doesn't need keyword research, and I believe you too shouldn't focus too much on this. Just try to cover all the topics in your field.
The Journey
This journey will not be updated daily, probably not even weekly. I also don't want to say too much as I don't want anyone to find out about the niche, or my website. But I will share my progress, P&L, as well as what I've done since the last update. I hope this journey can help save SEO, would be sad to see Google winning and everyone abandoning this business model.
Why this type of website you might ask? Well, Google is rolling out update after update. Favoring UGC, major news publications, and their own AI-powered snippet. I believe niche sites, as we used to know them, are dead in the water.
Instead, what I think will be the best approach going forward, is building larger sites. I'm not talking about building a major niche blog like PC Mag, you will never rank that. What I do suggest though is to think a bit outside the box we've all been living in for the past 10+ years. While niche sites are dead, forums, UGC type sites, or functional sites are thriving. I'm going for a functionality type website that is in high demand, with medium competition, and there's no way Google is ever going to add this in the SERP themselves.
Goals
Some may think my goals are ridiculous, but I know it's possible even if it's going to take time, money and a lot of hard work. I want this website to become the largest in the space, always be aiming for #1.
First Update
I started this site sometime early November and had prepared about 10% of the website beforehand so it would be ready for launch. I'm about 20% done with all the pages now, expecting to be 100% done by the end of the year, or possibly early 2024.
From day one I manually requested indexing in GSC and after a few days I started getting 5-10 daily clicks from Google. The first week after launch I had 52 clicks and 1.44k impressions in GSC, which is absolutely insane for a brand new domain. I will start showing some stats in the next update. But I won't show the GSC for November as I don't want people to know the exact date I started this project. I have to be careful not to reveal too much here, seen what happened to other members of this forum. You just have to take my word for when I launched the site.
Until the next update I want to get 30-40% of all the pages done. I will also have a few quality backlinks, and hopefully plenty of traffic.
Thanks for reading!
