Three case study updates on the same day. My girlfriend went to a wedding and left me to my own devices and with unrestricted access to the coffee pot. When the cat’s away the mice will… write SEO case studies. Apparently.
The first couple of weeks has been… interesting.
I think I need a disclaimer right away on this one. I’m not letting the AI just run riot and write content by itself. It’s a tool to help writers just do what they do better. It also doesn’t write content that is especially good at ranking (despite what a sales page tells you). The early results I’m seeing I put down entirely to being able to publish a lot of content in an underserved niche.
I’ve covered some of the tools and my opinion on search engines detecting AI in the video but even if you’re completely against the use of these tools you should at least be aware of them. If you’re outsourcing, you’re probably getting this kind of content anyway.
It’s only been a few weeks but since the first site is (quite possibly) the fastest I’ve ever seen a niche site grow and we’ve made a few changes. So I thought an update wouldn’t be the worst plan.
Site 1
Published words: 171,756. Averaging 45+ unique visitors a day (and growing). These are actual visitors, largely US-based and they’re engaging with the content. For a brand new site, both of these numbers are pretty crazy.
A few dozen visitors a day isn’t paying for the Lambo anytime soon but damn if it doesn’t bode well for a good cash-flowing project.
The early articles were produced in 7-9 minutes. Once the site started to show some traction it went for higher volume, more competitive terms so it was closer to 25 minutes so we could publish a higher word count, tackle more sub-topics and nail the quality a little better.
Now the main base of articles is published we’re going to slow things down a bit. Publish an article or so a week and just let it age into the SERPs. The early results are promising but it’s still SEO so it’s a long road before we’re seeing meaningful numbers.
And that brings me to the change of plans.
Site 2
The original plan for this case study was to focus on producing new websites. That’s still on the cards however for the sake of the case study I wanted to add some more established domains to the mix.
If you speak to anyone who works with niche sites for a living they’ll tend to focus on established domains. Rather than waiting for 12 months+ for an article to start getting traction, an established domain will rank a lot faster and therefore make a return on your investment (whether that’s time or money) a lot faster.
Site 2 is based on a high traffic and low DR competitor with some very sub-par content quality. It was either some poorly edited AI or an underpaid writer that put the content together so I do think there’s a market to compete there.
We did start site 2 and I’ll come back within the next couple of weeks to push it but to see some more immediate results I’ve added two established domains to push.
Site 3 and 4
Sites 3 and 4 are pretty similar. Started around the same time they are about 2 years old, have fairly stable traffic and have been cash flowing for a while. They have topical authority, niche related backlinks and they could both use some more content to scale further.
Site 3 was at 211,999 published words and is now at 256,000 (with more to come). Site 4 is a higher RPM niche with similar earnings but only had about 75,000 words published – we’ve pushed that to about 80,000 now with a lot more potential to come.
I’ve only just started pushing content to these sites so while we’ve had a slight uptick (possibly from just showing some activity and freshness) it’ll still be a while before all of this content fully ages in.
The Way Forward
Site 1 has enough content to keep it updating for the next couple of weeks. I’ll do site 2 next month (I’m taking some time away to chill on a beach this month and that probably won’t help the productivity). The focus is going to be on sites 3 and 4.
I want to push the content on those sites so hard that we see a real bump in the traffic for these sites. It’ll make for a more interesting story than waiting for brand new domains and, of course, if we get the extra ad revenue I’m sure I’ll find a way to invest it in some more content somewhere.