The “No Stone Unturned” case study - month 15 update

In the last update, I mentioned that I'd provide an update in a few months, and according to my calendar reminder, that time is already here.

I don't have a ton to share, so I'll keep this update fairly brief. With that being said, things are at least trending in the right direction again, which is great to see.

Since it's been a while since the last update, be sure to check out the full playlist over on YouTube or the previous posts over on the blog if you need a refresher on the general strategy behind this case study.

Posts

First, just to show you where we're at on the publishing side, here's the number of posts, as well as what's currently in the queue:

We do like to schedule our posts out in advance across our sites, so we tend to have about a one-month buffer scheduled that slowly runs down before we get our next batch of outsourced articles back.

Changes

As far as changes, I'll be honest - we haven't done much. We've more or less put this site on the backburner, waiting to see what happens with a future Google update.

With that being said, we did make two changes. First, we lowered our publishing frequency down to roughly 2-3 posts/week. This will continue through February, but we're going to bump this up to 5 posts/week starting in March.

Second, we switched to Content Pit (use discount code PIU10 for 10% off your first order, up to 10k words) for 100% of our outsourced articles, not just on this site, but all of our sites.

Up until a month or so ago, we had been using Textun for the content on this site. While that content was decent, the increase in quality with Content Pit is night and day.

I don't attribute the traffic bump (I'll get to this shortly) to the change in writing services since we just made the move, but going forward, the quality will be much higher across all of our sites.

Traffic

Now onto the part that most of you probably care about, and that's the traffic.

As I mentioned earlier, we haven't made any drastic changes to this site, yet as you'll see below, we saw a nice bump with the December algorithm updates (which seemed to take effect around January 6th on this site and many others, from what I've heard).

Here's what that slight recovery looks like in Search Console:

And here's what it looks like in Analytics:

While we're not even back to where we were last August, we've gone from a slow and steady decline to a quick increase back in the right direction.

Again, this is without making any changes to the site, so sometimes it really as simple as waiting for Google to roll back some of their changes with a future update, which seems to happen more than you would think.

Final Thoughts

Considering we haven't made any efforts to try and recover from the previous algorithm hit, I'm pretty happy to at least see a partial recovery with this site.

I do still feel that the idea behind the site makes a lot of sense (both for visitors and Google), so I see no reason not to move forward. As long as the traffic stays flat or moves upwards, we'll at the very least trickle some articles to the site to see what happens.

Look out for another update in a few months, unless something significant happens before then.

Jeff

Next Steps

Take the course: The Passive Income Unlocked Protocol​

Check out more content at the Passive Income Unlocked website​

Watch videos on our YouTube Channel​

​