[Case Study] Let's learn together

Alright, so this journey is going to be a little different. Its not one of those threads where I want to make $XXX in XXX time. This one is going to be a learning journey. I want to test out a few things and I think that the results could benefit other people, as well as solve a few specific questions a few people have. This is gonna be a long journey, since I'm working only with white hat on this one, each case study could take up to six months.

There are two things I want to test first, each one a different study.


1st Case Study) This might sound a little wacky but I wanna take my site building strategy in a whole other direction. With google's recent updates, they are penalizing more and more people who over do SEO, excessive backlinks, crappy backlinks, etc.. So I'm going to do a minimalistic approach. Google wants sites that don't seem like they were made to make money and that deliver quality content, so that is exactly what I'm going to give them.

I'm not gonna do any backlinking or traffic strategy, I'm doing the bare minimum SEO, I'm pretending I am an average Joe who doesn't know anything about SEO. The good thing about this is that I'm not going to have to keep worried about the SEO on my site, on every page, every post. I'm kinda paranoid about that stuff lol. All I'm going to worry about is quality content. I'm going to get in about at least 3 posts a week, some will be videos or fotos.

The idea is that most sites really take a long time to get a large number of backlinks, a really long time. So I'm not gonna go about building backlinks. The idea here is to test out just how far quality content alone will get you, as well as to how the recent google updates will react to such a situation.

So here's what I have done so far:

- Researched for an EMD, found one with 75k exact searches, approx. 42 million search results (I know this is a lot, but none of the sites on the first 5 pages have anything to do with this niche, nor do they have the keyword in their meta data. Most of them are just pages from a few news sites that mention the keyword in their post, but really aren't offering what the surfer is looking for, nor any niche content.). I'm pretty confident I can eventually rank on the first page in a while. And each comission I get from this site will land me about $100-$150 a pop. So when I get to the first page I think it'll bring in some cash.

- Installed wordpress on the domain.

- Downloaded and installed a niche related theme.

-Installed plugins that will give me info about my traffic, as well as google analytics for the click heatmap they have as well as other info. Also installed a plugin to help manage my ads, as well as the usual security plugins, etc..

-Site has been live for 10 days, 6 posts have been made, all posts and pages have been indexed so far.

- So far I'm in position 390 for my main keyword, but that is to be expected as the site is brand new.

- Have recieved 9 visitors so far, no sales.


I plan on going on with this for 6 months, and see the results. This is a non english site, and will fit perfectly for testing out my second case study.


2nd Case Study) So this one is a doubt I've had for a while. Which is, how much does backlinks from sites that aren't from your country or language affect you. How much of a boost will it give? Will it have a negative impact?

So since the site from my 1st case study isn't an english site, it will fit perfectly. I will take it and during 6 months, build backlinks only from english sites and see how it affects the SERPs.

I manage a few sites that aren't in english and I have a hunch that my websites which have backlinks from sites that are the same language are ranking better, but I can't bet on that 100% because there are many factors. The good thing about the first case study is that I'm not worrying about SEO, so when the 2nd case study starts, I will have what I believe to be an actuall reflection on exactly how much the links from sites in english are affecting my site.

The 2nd case study will only start after the first one is finished, so that's in around six months. I'll try to post often and update you guys on what going on with my site.


The idea of this post is so we can all learn together, so when you guys have an idea don't be shy to share it. Also feel free to ask questions.

If you have any ideas for different case studies that you think would be interesting, post them and I'll pick a few to test out later, and of course, share the results.

Update:

- Added a "videos" page on my blog, with a few niche related vids, will be updating weekly or every 15 days with fresh videos.

- Added a photo gallery to the blog, with niche related 97 pictures and comments.

- Added a new post.

- Added wp plugin called "social", that auto tweets new blog posts. Added this to make the website seem more legitimate.

Stats:

- New blog post was already indexed, still nowhere near ranking for my main keyword.

- The websites got its first 8 visitors today.

Interesting route you're taking. Keep us (or me) updated, this can be a very profitable method - minimal and white hat. Good luck man.

Still posting as per my plan. I have attached a picture with my ranking in a few keywords I'm tracking. Still not showing up for my main keyword.

keep this update, I believed I have something to learn here..

How narrow a niche is a niche?

I mean how do you define a niche that may work for your strategy?

Is "baby stroller" (high competitive) good? Or ""lightweight baby stroller"?

For SEO, I know I need much more work to rank for pages in "baby stroller" site than "lightweight baby stroller". And keyword research part is very important to succeed.

So what's your take on niche / keyword research with your method?

Wow that a very brave thing to do



Quality content and no backlink i hope u r a very very good writter

Thanks for creating this thread: subscribed!
I'd like to have a more detailed descriptions of this part of the post:

-Installed plugins that will give me info about my traffic, as well as google analytics for the click heatmap they have as well as other info. Also installed a plugin to help manage my ads, as well as the usual security plugins, etc.

Click to expand...

Which plugins have you installed?

Thanks!

freshstart said:

Thanks for creating this thread: subscribed!
I'd like to have a more detailed descriptions of this part of the post:

Which plugins have you installed?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Jetpack (former WP Stats), Clickheat Dynamo, Google Analytics, 360 Analytics (allows me to see GA stats from within my dashboard)
Better WP Security, 404 Redirected, AdRotate, Affiliate Link Cloaking, Google XML Sitemaps, Meteor Slides, Robots Meta, Social, W3 Total Cache
WordPress SEO

audioguy said:

How narrow a niche is a niche?

I mean how do you define a niche that may work for your strategy?

Is "baby stroller" (high competitive) good? Or ""lightweight baby stroller"?

For SEO, I know I need much more work to rank for pages in "baby stroller" site than "lightweight baby stroller". And keyword research part is very important to succeed.

So what's your take on niche / keyword research with your method?

Click to expand...

The more narrow the niche, the easier it is to rank since there is less competition (as you yourself said). So in your example, I would usually go for "lightweight baby stroller". However, I'm working with a keyword that IMO is a nice little gem =] There is little competition, so I going for the "baby stroller" keyword, I'm going to try to establish my site as an authority site and rank serveral pages for different long tail keywords.

I use wordtracker.com (I have a paid account) to research and build my campaigns and ideas. I pick an offer that I want to work with first and search for good keywords to see if its viable. I don't have really any secret method to do this, I just keep testing and testing different Kws.

UPDATE:

Added a few more posts, (I post once every 2 days), and left a few scheduled ahead. Created a tumblr account for the site, linked it with the sites twitter account. No significant change in keyword ranking yet but got 43 UV this week. Not a lot but slow and steady wins the race.

UPDATE:

Programmed 5 more posts for the next weeks. Over these last 3 days the websites twitter account has gotten around 30 new followers. I have been thinking about eventually creating a plus 1 profile for the site and buying some +1's to see if it influences the sites ranking like some think. I think it would also make viewers think the site is more legitamate and important.

Much more interested in threads like this than journey posts, since it seems like 9/10 journeys are by people who have no clue how to set a reasonable goal. I much prefer the idea of having a plan and seeing what happens with it.

I'm only starting in the IM world, and I'm kind of in between what you're doing and the "typical" approach. My niche has far less competition (wanted to start with something manageable), but I'm mixing some SEO optimization with some posts that are purely written as quality content (not that the others aren't quality).

Very interested to see how things work out for you.

Question about buying +1's: I've heard google can sniff those out pretty quick. What're your thoughts?

pnvhq said:

Much more interested in threads like this than journey posts, since it seems like 9/10 journeys are by people who have no clue how to set a reasonable goal. I much prefer the idea of having a plan and seeing what happens with it.

I'm only starting in the IM world, and I'm kind of in between what you're doing and the "typical" approach. My niche has far less competition (wanted to start with something manageable), but I'm mixing some SEO optimization with some posts that are purely written as quality content (not that the others aren't quality).

Very interested to see how things work out for you.

Question about buying +1's: I've heard google can sniff those out pretty quick. What're your thoughts?

Click to expand...

I never really bought +1's before, but i guess they could sniff it out quick seeing as most people buy packs of 100s or 1000s. Maybe with a quality seller and drip feeding a low random amount of +1s daily could work. But maybe for even that to work your site might need the traffic to support it (e.g. your site only gets 5 uv a day and you are getting 20 +1's a day. Not sure if google analyzes this way but it seems pretty stupid to me and would raise flags if I were google seeing low traffic pages getting tons of +1s). Maybe buying traffic from sources that provide niche traffic could be a work (or maybe not since the ip of the +1 wont be the same as the visitors) around. I'm sure there is someway to ger the +1's to stick, just gotta think about it patiently, it was only an idea I had that if I manage to find a safe way I'll implement since this is a whitehat site. If I dont I wont risk my site.

With these sorta things you just gotta think it over and think of how things would seem to google, not just simply go buying/doing things because its working for someone else or because someone said something. Don't trust anyone but yourself. Most people are spouting BS from their mouth and don't know a thing. Hey even I don't know a lot, sometimes I just speculate and reason what seems logical (something even most people seem to not be able to do sometimes). We'll only know things while we test and even that knowledge wont last to long because the game is always changing.

Sorry for the rant hauahaua and thanks for the kind words about my thread, if you have any questions/need any help ask away.

How are you going about promoting your social accounts (twitter, etc)? Is it just people subscribing from having visited your site, or are you using hashtags or what?

pnvhq said:

How are you going about promoting your social accounts (twitter, etc)? Is it just people subscribing from having visited your site, or are you using hashtags or what?

Click to expand...

Atm my only social accounts are twitter and tumblr, still trying to decide if I will do a facebook (probably not). I'm not promoting them at all, I had only like 5 subscribers from site visits to my twitter account but I got two retweets these days and that originated the extra followers. I guess if I keep providing niche targetted quality stuff the followers will keep rolling in. Slowly, but consistently.

UPDATE:

Pretty happy with the results so far, just checked it and I'm in the top 100 for my kws #5 and #6, which together bring in about 2.5k exact searches. Hopefully in about two more weeks I'll hit top 50, and then in two more top 10-20 at least.

UPDATE:

Just a quick one, the posting has been going on per schedule still, I've jumped up to position 169 for my main keyword. So in almost a month I went up over 100 positions. My main goal now is to get atleast around page 2-3 in the next month.

UPDATE:

I've been going as planned, only missed two posts due to a few problems but nothing major.

KW Ranking:

(KW/Position/Exact Monthly Searches)

Main keyword ----> #102 ---> 135000
Second Keywrod ---> Not Ranked ----> 49500
Third Keyword ---> #26 ----> 12100
Fourth Keyowrd ----> #100 ---> 6600
Fifth Keyword ---> #9 ---> 720
Sixth Keyword ---> #24 ----> 590


Post Count: 24 posts made


Traffic Stats:




Ad Stats:



I've starting testing more with my ads, especially with placement. I haven't got any sales yet but I have managed to get a lot more clicks on my ads.

As I said, I'm not going to build links for these first six months, but I have been starting to get a few natural backlinks (30 so far). I guess when you produce quality content the links come by themselves (at a slower pace of course).

My heatmap is showing that 54% of all clicks on my site are to my header. I guess its people wanting to return to the homepage. I'm thinking about setting it up to redirect a % of people that click on it to a different page/ad.



So far I'd say things are going ok, no money yet but slowly starting to establish myself as an authority in my niche. I'm hoping this will be making around $400-$500 atleast, in about 3 more months.

I'm going to post a more detailed post tommorrow, but WOW, this week my daily UV are around 100 each day and I've started to kill in my ranking. #4 for my main keyword, and page 1 for two other kws.

Alright, so it took a little longer than planned but here's a more detailed post:

I have started ranking high on quite a few search terms. Here's the KW rank and some traffic stats:







I dont really have all those backlinks, maybe some error or something, especially since its showing the exact same value for all the search terms.

Here's some ad stats:



I've started testing around witt some different sponsors since I wasn't making any money with the other adds. So far I've made $75 the last two weeks.


I've been getting some natural backlinks, haven't build any myself. So far this is proving the old say that content is king. I've managed to outrank some other big sites, but for my main keyword a youtube video is rankng #1 and this video has nothing to do with the niche. I'm still thinking about how to handle that.

Another problem I'm facing is monetizing, with the traffic I'm getting I was hoping to be making more money because it's pretty targetted and my website is providing very good niche content. I haven't been colecting emails or anything but soon I'll probably start building a list somehow. I'm also starting to think about locking some content, but I don't think that will help with my traffic, and might turn off a lot of people.