SEO Case Study Update

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello. It is after the 26th of January, which means we are officially back to work. No, it's after the 26th of Jan, which until the 26th of Jan SEO doesn't happen. No, nothing happens.

ARTHUR: Nothing happens in SEO. The roads are empty. Kids are on holidays. Do you know how much traffic I had on the way in today? How much? Ridiculous. A 10 minute trip was about 25 minutes. Wow. Yeah. The rain didn't help, but it's just crazy how many less people are on the roads during that school holiday period. Because people are still working, but they're not working in offices. They're working from home.

MICHAEL: Yeah. My trip took about two and a half hours today.

ARTHUR: So this is a special episode. The first one we're recording in 2024. And you've flown all the way from the sunny Gold Coast to be here just to record in person.

MICHAEL: It's not like we could do it online or anything. I had to come all the way here to do it.

ARTHUR: Yes. It's better to do it face to face. Yeah, it is. It sounds better.

MICHAEL: It does.

ARTHUR: It flows better.

MICHAEL: It does. So, um, we've got a little update on the case study, the SEO case study. And when I say we, Arthur does, because full disclosure, you haven't done anything on it. I have done absolutely nothing.

ARTHUR: You know what, full disclosure, I haven't done a whole lot either, but I think we've gotten it to the point where we can reveal, I guess, what the domain is and just give you some, I guess, updates on results and what we've been seeing in the work we've done.

MICHAEL: All right, well, before we get to the domain, let's hold it back and show business. You got a little tease, and then we'll drop a bit later. Let's give some top line stats on, is this site getting traffic and rankings and where's things at? And then we'll reveal the domain, then we'll reveal the work that you have done, not me. I'm a bit of a listener for this episode too.

ARTHUR: Sure. All right. So yes, we have been getting traffic. So I mentioned in the last update, we installed GA4 and I'm pleased to announce that we've had close to 500 sessions, organic sessions this month from zero, obviously starting from scratch. And that's a pretty good uplift. It's only been a month and a half since I've started actually adding content to the site, so it's been pretty quick. Seeing that as well in Google Search Console, impressions up, clicks up a lot. A lot of different keywords are starting to show up. And then if you run it through Ahrefs, you can see organic visibility just spike up. So in the hundreds of keywords, I think, as of this morning. In terms of top 100? Top 100, yeah. We've got, I can't, I've got a screenshot here, Let me zoom in. How are your eyes these days? I've got glasses, which I have in my bag and I'm not wearing for this episode. I never see you wear them full stop. Well, you're never here, so. So top one to three, 11 keywords, four to 10, 30, and then 11 to 20 is eight. So yeah, it's a big improvement, basically a very steep incline.

MICHAEL: Hockey stick growth.

ARTHUR: That's it. Yeah. They call it in the biz. And then estimated traffic 600, um, age reps.

MICHAEL: So they also call it a traffic boner. I don't know if you've heard that term.

ARTHUR: I have. Yes. A traffic boner. Yeah. Cause it's a straight off. Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. So look, I mean it's very early days and like I said, I haven't really done a whole lot. A couple of maybe, I'd say probably about a day's worth of work combined. Um, but yeah, we're ranking really well for all the keywords that we're targeting. So I guess we can reveal them now.

MICHAEL: And I would say ranking really well, getting traffic and the SEO tactics that have been used, uh, let's say quick and easy. Probably the best way to describe it.

ARTHUR: Quick and easy SEO tactics we've gone for with this one. Do you want to talk about that before we talk about keywords or?

MICHAEL: We'll go on. Yeah. Like we, with this build, you know, there's work you do on a client site or a site that really matters to you. That's one bucket. Then there's work that you do as an SEO nerd, having fun testing things or just seeing what works. We've gone with the second for this site. So what does that mean in our world? What have you done that's quick and easy that means that you've only spent a day of work to get a site that's generating on track to do thousands of visitors a month after a couple of months?

ARTHUR: Well, I guess on the content side, it's all been AI. Yup. So whether it's been chat GPT or tools like koala, um, basically we've just used AI briefed in all the topics and the keywords and use that to churn out content. So that saved a lot of time. Um, koala, a lot of people probably wouldn't have heard of is it's a really cool content. AI tool where it basically writes amazing blog posts. So you give it like a topic, you give it, you know, keywords, you can let it basically use its own AI, but you can actually import whatever you want it to talk about, set the country, you know, style, language, it even generates images and videos for you.

MICHAEL: It'll pull like data from the live search results. Yeah. So it's sort of informed by what's there already.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So I've been using that to write all the supporting blog posts and they've been really good. Like the quality of the blog posts are like on par of what a human would write. Yeah.

MICHAEL: They're a bit one length, like generic. If you ask it to do humor, the humor is really bad. Yeah. So it's good for like, we've built a topical map for this site. And you know, a lot of that is content you need to have on your site that you don't expect to rank, but it helps boost the overall, I guess, topical authority of your domain. It's great for banging that out for this site. If it's on a site that you care about that people are going to read, you probably want to. put a bit more personality or turn a voice into it. But that can be done with a bit of editing, you know?

ARTHUR: Definitely, yeah. I mean, a lot of the time, if you're trying to rank a site, people don't really read blog posts on like, you know, if you're working on an e-com site, I'm not going there to read content, I'm going there to buy something. So a lot of it is like supporting content to build topical authority. So even if you're a client, I don't think there's any issues with using AI to write supporting content. But like I said, you know, some of the blog posts are ranking like deep in the SERPs. We haven't done any link building to those posts or the blog in general. So give it time and they'll start to rank for a lot more keywords.

MICHAEL: It's going to be interesting because these topics, the topical map that we came up with, it's not like the topics are super competitive. So if they don't rank, it's sort of an indicator that Google, It's not interested in this content because it's just wishy-washy nothing content.

ARTHUR: It could also be we're using Ahrefs for a lot of the, I guess, keyword tracking. So it could be that hasn't updated. Yep. Those posts could be ranking. I just haven't manually checked.

MICHAEL: Yeah, this is true. It would be interesting to see. But I guess on the other topic, or the big part of SEO, of course, is link building. Everyone's favorite topic in SEO. And we've done a little bit, but we haven't done a lot. We've done enough to get the ball rolling. If this were a real website for a real business, obviously the link building would really continue and your domain would boost in authority. And then that authority would start to flow through to the blog post and you'd expect them to rank. We'll see how much link building will keep going with this. Obviously, it's just a little test. We don't want to keep throwing money at links for this site that's not really achieving anything other than us talking about it on a podcast. But on the links, we've gone the quick and easy approach as well. So tell us, what do we do with links for this site?

ARTHUR: So we started off with citations that I found on Upwork. So a hundred Australian citations, I don't think even half of them were Australian, but just to get some foundation branded links, so we can start doing some, I guess, authority link building, but even that is, I use that term loosely. So we opted to try out a PBN link seller basically that had Australian PBNs. I can't remember how many we got. It wasn't a huge amount. Was it like 20? Maybe 10 to 20. PBN links that was supposed to be Australian domains. Yeah. And look, it's worked.

MICHAEL: So with the, so PBN, private blog network, someone owns like 10, 20 different.com.au websites. Yeah. So we got the 20 homepage links. There you go. That's the one. So someone owns these sites, they just exist purely to link to other websites. And we went .com.au because that's obviously a good signal for a .com.au site that we're trying to rank. We've never used this service before, we don't use it on clients, it's just out of our own interest. Like, what would happen if we use this? The interesting thing, the person that runs the PBN doesn't provide reports, so we don't know what domains, and he's blocked Ahrefs from seeing it. But we found them in Search Console. Yes.

ARTHUR: And they were the trashiest links. Yeah. Like, yeah. Bottom of the barrel type links. But they worked.

MICHAEL: For now.

INTRO: For now.

ARTHUR: Obviously for now. So it's not like a long-term, it's not gonna be a long-term strategy, but I guess for this little case study, we wanted to see what would happen, and short-term it's worked.

MICHAEL: So listen to every episode we've done on link building, what makes a good link and all of that. And basically these links are the opposite of that. Yes. It's going to be interesting. We'll leave this site up and, you know, maybe it starts to get initial traffic and then Google decides, nah, this sucks. Bang, blasted out of the search result. Or maybe it will just sit there forever. It's going to be interesting to see.

ARTHUR: I'm still going to do little bits and pieces. So there's still pages I wanted to add to it. Um, might even do like a little bit more link link building testing to different areas of the site. Yep. But like you said, it's not like we're going to invest a lot of, you know, time and money into it, but I guess the case study is not over yet. So this is true. I'm keen to see how far we can take it. Um, But yeah, basically it was just the citations and PBN links. And that's it so far.

MICHAEL: So far, yeah. What would you do next with link building for it?

ARTHUR: I'd probably, I guess I wanted to try different link vendors that have, you know, questionable links and see what they are and how they work and whether or not they actually move the needle or they complete junk. So use it as a bit of a testing ground, really.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: I like it. That's it. Not really going to, like I said, buy authority links because no point unless we're trying to long-term do something with the site. But at the moment, it's just a little fun case study.

MICHAEL: Fun case study, it's on an exact match domain. It's in a space that's not super competitive. There's other sites ranking that are like much stronger. So.

ARTHUR: We should talk about the keywords. Do you want to talk about, or do you want to.

MICHAEL: Maybe do the big reveal. Should we do the big reveal? Do you have a drum roll? There is a drum roll. So we've got a little pad here. That's got eight buttons. I reckon that's that one there.

ARTHUR: I've got a feeling. No, no, no. Green? I think so.

MICHAEL: Nope. Nope. Oh, it's not even a drum roll. It's a joke. Anyway, I'll do a little drum roll and then you can have the joy of revealing the domain name and then we can talk about keywords and all that. Ready?

ARTHUR: Ready? So the domain name is winacaraustralia.com.au.

MICHAEL: winacaraustralia.com.au.

ARTHUR: So I guess a little background behind that is that we were looking at different car competitions that were popping up on Instagram and then did a few searches and noticed that there were a bunch of these similar sites that were ranking really well for a lot of these, I guess. high volume keywords, like competitive keywords, but they had really, I guess, weak DRs or not much authority. So we decided, you know, why don't we give it a go? Like, you know, if they, if they can rank for these amounts of keywords with a low DR, we should be able to do the same. So that's what we did. And we managed to achieve that. And now we're ranking for, you know, a shitload of different, exact match keywords like win a car, win a car Australia, different types of, I guess, related keywords like car competition, car raffle, car giveaway. You know, these all have hundreds. Thousands.

MICHAEL: So the keyword win a car, I've just searched. Two and a half. One and a half thousand a month. So the guy that ranks first. competitions.com.au, DR33, with the thousand referring domains. And that site gets 45,000 visitors a month. But that's a broader competition. If we scroll down, there's another one here, competitions guide, DR30, six and a half thousand visitors a month. So they're not

ARTHUR: So are the ones with the low DR. There was a handful of them, maybe.

MICHAEL: You know, I'm seeing a lot of decent DR. There's like made a lotteries BP, DR 86. Surely I didn't make this up. Yeah. So probably for another keyword. But you know what? We're here. We're here in amongst these. Where are we?

ARTHUR: We're fifth for winter car. Eighth. I saw fifth earlier, but that's still pretty good.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Maybe win a car, win a car, Australia. We're first. Yeah. So eighth for when a car we've got DR 0.5. Yeah.

ARTHUR: So wait, I've got a couple of, a couple of the rankings here from AHRFs. So car competition fourth, that's got 200 according to AHRFs. Car giveaway Australia, 250 with third. Win a car free entry, 150 with second. Car competitions fourth. Nice. There's a whole bunch there. So like, you know, these aren't just, I guess, super long tail keywords with no search volume. These are keywords people are searching for.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And so when we did our research, the topical map. With the blog, you'll see on the site there's a blog section where we have all sorts of articles like your guide to finding car giveaways, how to start a car giveaway business, understanding the legalities, like all of the stuff that is broadly searched around the topic of car giveaways. And then in the main header, you'll see we've started to build out the architecture for the site. So things like electric car giveaways, Euro car giveaways, classic car giveaways, then car brands, win a Nissan, win a Toyota. Obviously that can be expanded out, win a Tesla, that sort of stuff.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that was GPT content. Yep. And from what I can see, not a lot of it is, um, ranking yet. So it could be interesting. I haven't, like I said, haven't done any building to any of those parts of the site yet, but I guess time will tell.

MICHAEL: Have you done much to optimize internal linking to those pages?

ARTHUR: Not yet. No. Um, little bits and pieces. So like internally linking from the homepage to those pages, but internally linking from those pages to the blog and vice versa. I haven't really done that much. Okay. So there's still a lot, a lot to do. And like I said, it's very much a work in progress, but I guess we're at the stage now where it is starting to work. So yeah, it makes sense to reveal it and people can check in if they want and see how we're doing.

MICHAEL: They don't need to wait for us to do negative SEO. Um, maybe I see here, here's an idea, just looking at the competition. So we have like little competitions and you can click inside as clicked into the BMW.

ARTHUR: Mm.

MICHAEL: You can put like related posts at the end that link to other competitions and then maybe like a widget or something that links to all of the winner Toyota car, winner Nissan, winner Mercedes type pages.

ARTHUR: When you say we, you mean me, right?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Just add it to the roadmap. It's on the roadmap. What else? What else have you got planned? Where, where, where do you see the future heading for winnercaraustralia.com.au?

ARTHUR: I don't know, to be honest, we have, yeah, we still have, like I said, pages that we want to build out. So work on that over the next couple of weeks and then just, I guess, grow it, see how it goes. Yeah. That's where it's at. Unless you have any ideas or.

MICHAEL: Well, I'll tell you what we could potentially do is that when we looked it up to start with some of these raffle companies do affiliate offers.

ARTHUR: Well, that's the monetize it in a way.

MICHAEL: Yeah, if we start getting traffic, we may as well chuck up some affiliate links and that would be a good update in the future. Like, hey, this Winnicar Australia made $47.30 in commission this month.

ARTHUR: Could do. Yeah. I mean, we haven't really gone and uploaded a lot of car giveaways and competitions. I've done a few and I'm pretty sure they're all out of date by now. Yeah. So I guess it also will require a bit of time and effort.

MICHAEL: We want to run it off some sort of a feed so that it's not like we're not having to add these pages, like a feed of them.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So that could be another possibility seeing what else we can automate.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so I reckon we want to try rank some of these car giveaway pages, so like classic car giveaway or electric car giveaway. And some of the brand pages, win a Toyota, just to see that we can do it with this site. Keep an eye on it, traffic, that sort of stuff. And then if it's worth investing the time, go down the affiliate path and see if we can earn $1 from this website.

ARTHUR: Even $1 would be exciting. If we could cover the costs of the link building that we're doing. Well, that would be amazing.

MICHAEL: That would be, yeah, that would be epic.

ARTHUR: Cool. Yeah. Let's do that. So maybe we can do another check-in at the end of February. I've got a few things I want to work on and then we'll give everyone an update and update on traffic and keywords and where, where things are at. Sounds good to me. Otherwise any, anything sooner is not enough time.

MICHAEL: Nah, even, well, I was thinking even February could be too soon. Like- Give it a month.

ARTHUR: Let's just say we'll do a monthly update. Month-ish.

MICHAEL: That's it, really? Well, I hope you're having fun with this. Do you think that churning out AI content and like links like this is a good play?

ARTHUR: No. Well, it is for short term, yeah. Yeah. Links definitely, short term, content, hard to say, like- All content is going to be eventually written, or at least assisted by AI. Oh yeah. Like no one's going to be sitting there typing out blog posts. I think long-term there's no real problems with AI content.

MICHAEL: The only problem I see is that the sheer volume of it is going to be impossible for Google to deal with. Yeah. So does it get to the point where it's just being pumped out by everyone all over the place and it's like going into this black hole, a void? where google will kind of is already i mean yeah but then this site right this site has very little by way of authority or links and if i do a site search all these blog posts are indexed so google's crawling reading it all the dead internet theory i know well you've spoken about that before but um maybe we can do an episode on it one day Yeah, you're going to need to get your conspiracy theory very clear before we do an episode on it.

ARTHUR: It's basically the theory that most of the internet now consists of mainly bots and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithm curation. So a lot of the content and everything isn't actually people. It's just bots and AI. Yeah. Well, that's, yeah. Hence the, like the internet being very different now to what it was 20 years ago when we first, or even earlier when we first started going on the internet and it was like- It was so magic back then. Magic. And now it just seems to be- Trash. Trash. Like just generic trash, repetitive. Like that's the dead internet theory. So it's not really a conspiracy. Like it's, it's happening. The whole internet is bogged down with AI and bots. Like,

MICHAEL: Social media is either walled, like Facebook's walled. You can't really get in there unless you log in. So there's Twitter and stuff. Yeah. Or it's like pages of recipes with like 5,000 words of trash before you get to the recipe. Yeah. Or big corporates behind paywalls as well. Yeah. That's it. That's the theory. No one's running like blogs with interesting stuff or forums with good lively discussions and.

ARTHUR: Even like the thing is when there is forums or like a Reddit type thing, again, there's heaps of bots on there. Yeah. Churning out like opinions and comments.

MICHAEL: Oh well Reddit now is going to be up against it with the amount of traffic they get from Google now. All the like parasite SEOs are flooding in and taking over any sort of commercially valuable keyword and trying to, you know, game it. So Google pumping all this traffic to Reddit has probably given them a massive moderation headache to deal with as well. Definitely, yeah. Yep. Anyway, we're adding our little, uh, efforts to the mix with our winnacaraustralia.com.au with 100% AI content for Google to crawl and index. And so far it has, and we're getting traffic. It's showing signs of life. We may even make a dollar online with it. Some point this year.

ARTHUR: We will. That's a mission now.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: We're going to monetize it and we're going to make at least a dollar out of this whole little experiment.

MICHAEL: And then you can update your Twitter bio to say SEO slash affiliate marketer. I can't even remember. I'll teach you to make your first dollar online. I don't use Twitter. By my course.

ARTHUR: I don't really use it. I use it to read tweets, but I don't post or do anything.

MICHAEL: I know, I'm making a terrible joke. I know.

ARTHUR: Then don't. Let's end it here before it gets even worse.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, that was the first episode of the year. Except for our interview with Goon. But the first episode with you and I. A little bit rusty. First of many. We will be back with another, I think it's about time we do a Stolen from Social episode of um… the SEO show, whatever this podcast is called. So that will be our next episode. We do have a whole bunch of people that we couldn't speak to in Chiang Mai that we will be speaking to this year. Very interesting stuff. Not necessarily all pure SEO, but maybe people that specialize in buying and selling of web businesses and stuff like in the SEO world, but not pure SEO, which will be interesting. As well as SEO nerds coming on to join us. That will all be coming soon. But until next time, happy SEOing.

ARTHUR: Happy SEOing.

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