SEO Case Study: First 6 Months on a New Site

Summary » In this post, I will discuss my approach to SEO, my best-performing posts, and talk about the results that you can expect if you’re doing everything solo without a marketing budget. TL;DR – The Google “gulag” is real.

It has been nearly 6 months since I began working on this site. And to be honest, I can’t even remember the beginning anymore. It’s been a bit of a slump with a lot of hard work involved, and I also had to juggle actual jobs that pay me since so far I have made exactly $0 from this blog, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

The last time I worked on a project like this was back in 2013. Back then, the blog I was working on had a little shy of 1 million unique clicks in the first year. But, I don’t expect that to happen this time around since content inflation over the years has been staggering.

And lest we forget that Google has been rolling out steady updates over the last 10 years, also. Although, I can say now that it is still pretty stupid in its decision making, and on top of that – new sites still get sent to the gulag where the algorithm can’t make up its mind.

TL;DR – stats & backlinks

Here are the key stats from the last 6 months:

Blog posts published: 35*
Clicks from Google: 24,000 from Search, 14,000 from Discover
Organic backlinks: ~450 referring domains

*This comes off as only 1 post every 5 days. The reason being quality > quantity, and, I’ve had to supplement my income with other freelance jobs.

So, the first thing you’ll notice is that I’ve had over 1 million impressions, but only an average CTR of 2.2%. The main reason being that I went all out on writing content that has a fairly large monthly search volume. But why?

Google does not explicitly affirm the concept known as “sandboxing”, but if you’ve ever built a content site you’ll know it’s a thing. The lowdown is that new sites get throttled until Google can make the assumption that, “Ok. I trust this site.”. And it makes sense.

In this context, I didn’t want to bother with writing on topics that have low monthly search volume and then build my way up like that. If I have to wait it out, then I might as well start with popular topics and focus on quality. Which, in my case, has led to some great results.

No links, no organic traffic

This is pretty common knowledge. Google loves links, and I don’t think it will ever be able to truly rank content without using backlinks as a primary signal.

But, unless you’re able to pump out exceptionally good content on a daily basis, a lot of your posts will linger around in the void, and maybe get picked up eventually. The only thing I noticed was that my Tailwind CSS articles didn’t have a lot of links pointing to them, but still managed to pick up a really good ranking.

I imagine this is because there are still only a handful of people actively writing on the topic.

A topic I do want to bring up is paid links. The idea that someone pays you to have their link inserted in your article. Despite the fact that my site is still very new, over the last 3 months I have gotten over 50 emails from individuals, agencies, and bloggers who have offered me money to include their products/pages in my articles.

*drum roll please*

There has been a lot of discussion on Google Search returning poor results:

My take on this is that it’s not necessarily the content that is bad, but the way that Google can be manipulated by paying for backlinks from established sites.

Unless they have plans to implement a more structured algorithm – I do think that search results will get increasingly worse. The fact of the matter is, that it’s impossible to compete with brands that have entire teams writing content, so buying links is an efficient method to circumvent the problem.

Stuffing & repetition in the top 10

A trend I observed quite early on is that a large proportion of the top 10 results are either repetitive (copied from one another) or stuffed with excess content.

Some of the more extreme examples included an article that was talking about the most popular front-end frameworks and had an 800-word slab of nonsense (titled: What is a front-end framework?) plastered below the intro but before the actual list of frameworks.

And that page is comfortably sitting as a top 5 result. Additionally, I saw that a lot of these top results use the same – peculiar – word to describe a certain feature. I mean, what are the odds that everyone would describe a certain feature using the same exact word?

I think it’s an old habit of Google’s algorithm to not be able to prioritize content that’s written in first-person, whereas search engines like DuckDuckGo do very well in this area.

Revenue & closing notes

As I said at the beginning, this site has netted me exactly zero dollars so far. I’ve gotten some advertising offers from platforms like Carbon and a few others. But, at this time, I don’t have any plans to use advertising. I’m able to financially support myself through other means, and ultimately my goal for this site isn’t to turn it into an advertising haven.

Besides, it’s kind of nice having uBlock Origin greyed out like that. ↗