I created a site that gets 300K-500K organic visits/month in 12 months - AMA

Thanks Jason, please review the thread for answers for details regarding content. But basically it's not a blog it's factual content from multiple data sets that I have collected for this site.

Hey Patrick, please scan the thread all info are given there.

It's short content site, somewhat like yelp but localized

Thank you for the encouraging words. Regarding backlinks I didn't really have a plan I think what helped here was that the site looked trustworthy and unique to be referenced for information and it was appearing high in search results so it was easily findable to other content creators.

Regarding the niche is it is general business services.

not really, this is a side project for me

Hey, Thank you.

1. I focus on ON page cause this I can control. Then try to do a little bit off page.
2. Content+Service.
3. Not known globally but locally yes they are known.
4. For revenue to start to match the potential, I need to do other things than Ads, but will need to get a partner or so to help with this part.

Sure, from a SE crawler bot point of view if it enters the site on any page it will be able to crawl all other pages within the site. I focused on providing good UX but still tried to balance that with making it easy for search engines to crawl and index all pages.

Here is my guess, it helps search engines crawl faster and make context for the pages

1. Automation is my game, it takes time to do right but once is set it helps.
2. It was a personal problem that I faced that's true .. I started searching for who is providing the information that I'm looking for but it was too scattered and very dated user experience, I had the tech that would give much better UX but was missing the data (that took time to get)
   3.Basically the problem was frequent, competition was not optimized for mobile, it was hard to get to the user answer in seconds,I know people are searching in two languages "I do" but the data was available in one and finally countries population is huge 80+ mil.
   4.It was quite technicall, This was my edge really as a solo founder competing against teams .. I know how to get and clean/organize data.

That's indeed true, it's somewhat similar to yelp

Thanks Jennifer

1. Currently Ads, started adding sponsored newsletter
2. Adsense mobile ads (I am fixing the size) not the best for revenue but I am prioritising UX.
3. 90% of the traffic is mobile traffic, not sure if Adblockers work on mobile too

1. Ads revenue is about $500 - $1000/month. Can also do sponsors and so but requires more time to handle.
2. It's like a local yelp answering questions about businesses and services, so multiple industries are included.
3. I am using sendinblue, like their APIs and they work well for me.

It's great specially that I wasn't expecting it, challenge that I am facing now is that I feel it needs more attention but it has never been my plan from the beginning :)

• I prepared content in iterations every quarter or so. I publish a lot but not often cause It's not my main thing.
• It's very optimised for mobile as I mentioned performs like a mobile app than a website so about 3-5% of the visitors install it.
  -It's embedded on every page just beside the most important piece of information that people would be looking to get.
  -Niche is broad business services related.

Left one is Google Analytics

Not an expert opnion, but try to honestly answer this question "can I do something better than the top 5 results for my keyword or niche?"

Just organic so far of course got social shares from visitors as well

Yes I mean internal links between pages .. it helps search engines find your content faster and make sense of how it relates per my experience

I would assume he means internal linking, but I dont see how simply linking pages together would do much for SEO.

Yes Tim, 2 copies of the page one in each language and added a way to switch the interface language

Hi Ellen, please scan the thread quickly all answers are there

It's all this plus page speed and core web vitals and user experience in general.

My information is very interlinked so I make sure if a search engine robot crawls a page it will be able to crawl the whole site no page is orphaned and so, will probably post a check list soon if there is an interest

The real gain is happening on the front end where I have removed all the unnecessary css/code and made things static with good caching policies. This also included using webp images as well etc.

I use ubber suggest, ahrefs for high level research but then start diving deeper with a lot of manual inspection to see how I can add more value.

Was absolutely new, but has the keyword and very short and memorable so had to do for something that isn't a .com or .net

Ah sorry I see you answered that already below, $500 - $1000/month right? Mostly via AdSense. I'm surprised the revenues aren't higher than that for that level of traffic. Are those revenues considered low, normal or high and any ideas why?

Thanks you

It's running on a Linux VPS from contabo that costs $7/month .. nothing fancy at all

I didn't do any marketing, it was a side project idea that I didn't know will grow that much. My thought when I did it was if I got 30k -50k visits a month with this it would be great but turned out I managed to hit a lot of search terms and rank well for them.

Thank you, that's a big list let me try to break down quickly :)
1- I did a lot of automations starting from collecting the data points for my data set to site management. 90% hand crafted (involved some IFTTT web hooks).
2-I tried to hit every bit of technical SEO that I can by that I mean (core vitals, UX, etc), the whole thing is hand crafted so I have a lot of control over everything within my stack.
3-I do retain users via newsletter, thing is I didn't start this in early enough, cause it was just an side experiment in the beginning.
4-I just started doing Facebook/instagram pages but even later than the newsletter.
5-The content is high quality cause it's factual information that comes from a data set and I don't really need to craft content think Wikitravel or Zapier integration pages for example, what is challenging though is to keep it up to date.
6-Not sure about the number of pages, and yes I rely on long term keywords .. however I rank for some high volume keywords.
7-I used ubber-suggest and lot of manual analysis for the niche before hand.

I see a lot of potential actually to expand but I would need to have a small team to take it forward at this stage I think.

The niche was a complete coincidence, I was on a long travel and I found that I have been looking for information everyday to contact and know information about local services, so thought why not get all this in one place. Did a quick check and found that all competition was not at the level that I had in mind. Started collecting the data (a ton of scraping) to collect and organize that data set that I needed and started generating the pages by blending the data together from different perspectives.

Sure, that choice took me a some time and was one of the reasons I delayed this post.
I wanted to post the link to the site itself but felt it is safer not to do so at this stage. It's a local niche with 5-6 eager competitors and since this is a AMA anything I really didn't want to gift them everything about my strategy .. so either to answer all questions openly or to reveal the site and hide some details and I chose the former. Hope it clarifies.

Everything is almost programattic, some pages has human touch but minor. That was before chatgpt became a thing :)

Yes Ads, since it's a side project for me I'm monetizing via ads. More could be done probably but would require more attention and team. It's ranging between $500-$1000 per month cause I'm not loading the page with a lot of ads just 1-2 and this is one of the reasons I believe that helps with UX.

Yes all only SEO, this was a form of programattic page creation. So I managed to create large amounts of pages by organizing the data in different variations with a lot of interlinking