My Learning Journey!

Hi everyone,

Using this space for a bit of a journal on learning SEO.

Many years ago I did an SEO course and successfully ranked a friends business, but didn't look further into building a career out of it and moved into other areas of IT. But I'm back!
I'm currently setting up two small ecommerce sites for party services and having some small success with ranking low volume low competition keywords, I've just purchased some seo packages for backlinks and I'm continuously pumping relevant content.

My Project: Parcel Tracking
My next learning exercise will be a website for parcel tracking, I've just bought a 'lease to own' domain, not sure if I'm allowed to share the domain..?

Semrush auth score of 29, 44.4k backlinks
Ahrefs Domain Rating 14, 127k backlinks

The site is currently indexed on google but all junk pages, and the hosting for the domain looks to be dead.

Purpose
Learning experience and potentially run ads on the site if it generates enough traffic. Would also be nice to 'own' a traffic website

Plan
- Setup Host & Website (new website, no archive available)
- Rebuild broken links to redirect to home page
- Generate relevant articles
- Build landing page for every parcel freight provider that I'm tracking on keywords (example site-title: Track your DHL order)

Goals
Rank 1 of the 500 keywords in Top 10 by the end of August

Costs so far
Domain: 109usd (monthly)
Hosting: 5.99usd
Semrush: 24usd (monthly) (20% of total account cost)

Achievements so far
None yet! to be updated


I'm open to feedback from BHW, is this some content you're interested in following?

Good luck on your journey!

A few, small tips/questions:
- don't share your domain here. You never know who is reading and it's possible someone could steal your niche & become your new competition.
- Why did you choose to lease a domain at that price instead of buying a decent expired domain that you could just recover? (Sometimes, there's no good niche relevant domains left, so I understand if that's the reason).
- Don't forget to run the old content that you were able to restore through a plagiarism checker, just to be safe.

Again, best of luck!

PHPInjected said:

Good luck on your journey!

A few, small tips/questions:
- don't share your domain here. You never know who is reading and it's possible someone could steal your niche & become your new competition.
- Why did you choose to lease a domain at that price instead of buying a decent expired domain that you could just recover? (Sometimes, there's no good niche relevant domains left, so I understand if that's the reason).
- Don't forget to run the old content that you were able to restore through a plagiarism checker, just to be safe.

Again, best of luck!

Click to expand...

I spent hours searching for domains, I couldn't find any good established ones until I came across this one. I saw the price and it was expensive, but then noticed it had a lease to own monthly rate that was only 109usd. I don't mind spending a few hundred in the next 3 months to see if I can gain any traction, if it doesn't work out i'll exit the contract and take it as a learning experience.

I haven't been able to find the old content on archives or cache, i'll keep searching!

Muneevv said:

I spent hours searching for domains, I couldn't find any good established ones until I came across this one. I saw the price and it was expensive, but then noticed it had a lease to own monthly rate that was only 109usd. I don't mind spending a few hundred in the next 3 months to see if I can gain any traction, if it doesn't work out i'll exit the contract and take it as a learning experience.

I haven't been able to find the old content on archives or cache, i'll keep searching!

Click to expand...

Leasing a domain on a monthly basis is risky IMO.
What happen if the OO goes rogue overnight when you have successfully ranked for your keywords?

Markverse said:

Leasing a domain on a monthly basis is risky IMO.
What happen if the OO goes rogue overnight when you have successfully ranked for your keywords?

Click to expand...

I hope thats not the case, its leased through Dan, as far as I can tell, Dan transfers the domain from the seller to their own registrar that i'll be able to access nameservers, but I or the seller won't have access to transfer the domain (unless I fail to make payments then the seller gets to takeover)

Muneevv said:

I hope thats not the case, its leased through Dan, as far as I can tell, Dan transfers the domain from the seller to their own registrar that i'll be able to access nameservers, but I or the seller won't have access to transfer the domain (unless I fail to make payments then the seller gets to takeover)

Click to expand...

DAN has just been acquired by godaddy a week ago, your domain is already doomed