We launched our first owned and operated (O&O) website and want to share with you what we are doing and the SEO results from our efforts.
What Is This About?
We help startups and small/medium sized business with their SEO, specifically their technical SEO and long-form content creation. We don’t recommend or advise our clients to do anything that we wouldn’t do ourselves.
To illustrate that, we are launching an owned and operated website using the same methodologies we use with our clients. We will refer to this site as “Website A”.
We are going to share what we are doing and the results as we move through the project over a 12-month period.
The Domain
We won’t share the domain. That could bring unwarranted competition, but we will share what we are doing and our results each month.
Our Goals
Our primarily goal to give folks like you who are interested in SEO an idea of the type of results an SEO campaign focused on quality long-form content can achieve.
Secondarily, as a company we want to diversify our revenue streams. By creating an independent website, we will have the opportunity to monetize it with display ads, affiliate links and/or selling products direct to consumers.
Duration
We are going to update this post for the next 12 months from January of 2022 through December of 2022. If we fall short of that cadence, it is because client work was the priority. It always is.
Our Expectations
As a guide, it takes 9 months for content to show 80% of its SEO value. The clock begins the day you publish an individual page/post. Healthy sites that have been live for some time may see faster results. Newer sites in more competitive niches will take longer to see SEO results.
We chose the niche we did for Website A because 1) we saw immediate opportunities for SEO traffic and 2) we think there is potential to be a B-level player in a crowded and competitive space in the next 2-3 years. We are shooting for 250K monthly pageviews in 2 to 3 years.
Our Pessimistic 12-Month View:
If rank and traffic are slower than we anticipated, we will need to produce more content over the next 12 months to achieve our 2-to-3-year goal. We may also need to optimize existing content and/or reevaluate our initial SEO strategy.
Our Optimistic 12-Month View:
If we are seeing the right SEO signals that suggest our strategy is working we will continue building content to continue to generate long-term SEO value.
Yes, we intend to produce more content regardless of the early results. We believe our situation assessment is correct and it is not a matter of if, but when and how to achieve the goal of 250K monthly pageviews in 2 to 3 years. If there is new information that shows itself, we will of course reconsider if this site is worth our time and energy or change our approach.
Metrics We Will Share
We will share production and performance metrics each month.
- Production metrics are what we did.
- Performance metrics are the SEO results of the production metrics. We will share screenshots from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Results By Month
December 2021
- Production.
- Registered the domain
- Secured a host
- Set up WordPress
- Coordinated with our design and content resources
- Created our first 3 months of content requests (blog posts)
- Performance
- NA
January 2022
- Production
- We came out of the gate strong and published 115 posts of content. Posts contain an averaging of 1,100 words in the month of January.
- Performance
- NA
February 2022
- Production
- We published an additional 35 post in February, bringing the total of posts to 150.
- Performance
- 8 SEO visits according to Google Search Console.
March 2022
- Production
- We haven’t published any new posts. The total number of posts remains at 150.
- Performance
- 5 SEO visits according to Google Search Console.
- Secondary metrics including impressions and the number of keywords the site is ranking for have started to increase.