In my last email, I was telling you how Google seemed to be having a change of heart when it came to the merits of my Mediavine site (it’s in the food / diet niche).

Here’s a reminder of the graph I shared - demolition derby followed by (very) tender shoots of growth:

On that date (Jan 8), my site generated 1,451 impressions. The following day, it shot up to 1,771 impressions.

Now, given you probably used a telescope to spot the increase in the graph above, here’s a much closer view today. Keep in mind that as I said a few days ago, this is a somewhat-seasonal niche where activity naturally picks up around Christmas with people searching on food-related queries.

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But we are firmly past Christmas now and into the new year.

So you would expect impressions and clicks to be heading south for the rest of the winter.

But here’s what’s actually happening:

Now, I’m an eternal optimist and have been in the SEO and analytics a LONG time, so you know I’m gonna keep checking these stats! I’m sure you can identify with that :)

Now I’m not popping any champagne just yet - far from it. The site has had 705 sessions in the past 7 days:

-193 from Bing (+4% week-on-week)

-150 from DuckDuckGo (+3%)

-125 from Yahoo (+30% (Wow, Yahoo is still going)

-80 from Google (flat week-on-week, but impressions are trending up)

And when I look at the past 30 days, Google organic is up 98% (pretty good, even allowing for Christmas).

What does this mean?

I’m not sure, but I do know the site has gone from being basically bumped off Google (I couldn’t even find the homepage with a Google search at one stage), to seeing pages popping back on page 1 and impressions trending up.

I’m really not expecting too much though. I mean, if Google decided to 4x my 80 visits in the past week, that would equate to around 1200-1300 visits/month - not huge but any continued trend upwards would be cool.

January is generally a lot quieter than December too of course, so who knows what might happen as the year progresses.

I could scale up content production again with AI and see if Bing and DDG send me lots more traffic.

The site now makes between $60-$100/month, so if I tripled the traffic with lots more content, would I start making around $200-$300/month? That would be nice, and doing it with AI means the ROI would be sweet if the traffic trend maintained or increased over time.

Speaking of AI content….

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What else is happening?

I just renewed with my Pinterest agency for another month at least, as the trends are looking good for my other site in a very visual / artistic niche.

Here are the latest number for the past month:

If you want the name of the agency I’m using, reply to this email!

Chat next week, when I’ll most likely have an update on what I’m doing with my lead gen site that generated around 100 leads last year, and is set to do lots more this year.

Have a great weekend.

Before you go…

Browse my suite of recommended tools.

Best of luck with your projects!

Anton

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