The "No Stone Unturned" case study: update #9

We’re now nine months into the No Stone Unturned case study site, so this is the point where we really want to see a site quickly approach the Mediavine threshold of 50,000 sessions/month.

As you’ll see below, we’re still a ways off from this milestone, but if this site’s trajectory is like most of our other sites, we’ll be there within the next few months.

If you’re unfamiliar with this case study, be sure to check out the full playlist over on YouTube or the previous posts over on the blog.

Taking a Step Back

Before I jump into the numbers, I want to take a step back and look at our initial thought behind this site and whether or not we still think it makes sense.

In a nutshell, our strategy for this site was to cover each topic on the site in depth before moving onto the next topic. Not just the low-competition keywords, but literally every relevant keyword (within reason) around a topic.

With all of these related articles, another big part of the strategy was to add a ton of relevant internal links between the articles in each cluster and between the clusters as well.

The overall goal was to create a site that not only shows Google that we’re an authority on each topic, but also provides our visitors with a great user experience by giving them everything that they’re looking for.

Whether or not this approach will help us rank for more, and tougher, keywords is still to be determined. On the visitor side, I have to say that I really like the approach.

With our other sites, we’ve always focused on targeting mostly low-competition keywords, so the sites as a whole tend to have a lot of random articles that don’t really make sense next to each other.

With this case study site, the structure is much more clearly defined, and as a visitor, the user experience is significantly better.

I don’t know whether or not we’ll go down this road on our other sites anytime soon, but we’re definitely going to go in that direction by publishing more articles around each topic on each site. There are clear benefits to doing this, and this will be a part of our overall approach going forward.

Next, let’s take a quick look at the progress on this site.

Posts Published

In July, we published another 27 articles, bringing the total number of posts on the site to 374:

Topic Clusters

As far as topics go, we’re now into the 10th cluster, which is a big one and still isn’t finished:

Traffic

The traffic on this site continues to grow at a nice rate. Like I mentioned earlier, we’re still quite a ways off from Mediavine’s requirement of 50,000 sessions/month, but typically when a site gets over the 10,000 pageviews/month mark, it climbs quickly.

Here’s a screenshot of the lifetime clicks and impressions from Search Console:

This one is similar to the one above, but includes all traffic sources and is from Google Analytics:

Final Thoughts

While we’d like to be a bit closer to that 50,000 sessions/month mark by now, we’re still happy with the progress that we’re seeing on this site.

Considering that only about half of the articles that we’ve published are targeting low-competition keywords, and we haven’t even gone as far as creating a social profile for this site, the growth rate so far is quite promising.

Keep an eye out for another update in about a month.

Jeff

Next Steps

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