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Another month is in the books for our “no stone unturned” case study site. If you’re not familiar with the case study, check out the launch video.
With this site being only two months old, I’ll keep this update relatively short.
Posts
Our goal with this site is to publish roughly 40-50 posts/month, at least initially. During the month of December, we added another 50 posts, bringing the total up to 91. This was done in batches of about 10-15 posts per week, as we received them.
Indexing
Just like in November, we didn’t run into any issues with indexing in December. The screenshot below shows the coverage report from Search Console:
Topic Clusters
In the launch video, I mentioned that we built up a list of topics that covered two clusters within the niche, totaling about 150 posts. After reviewing those keywords, we ended up combining some of them to bring that total down a bit.
We published the last few articles of the first cluster in the first few days of January, with a total of 71 posts. We’re still publishing posts for cluster #2, which will end up around 45 posts total.
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Our original plan was to publish all of cluster #1 before moving onto cluster #2, but since we outsourced many of these at the same time, we ended up getting articles back for both clusters simultaneously.
This really shouldn’t impact the case study at all, since at the end of the day, we’re still going to be covering every topic we can find within each cluster.
Internal Linking
One of the biggest parts of this case study is adding internal links within each cluster, as well as adding appropriate links between those clusters. With that being the case, we’ve really put a huge emphasis on adding internal links as we go, which we typically neglect until down the road.
The number of internal links that we’ve added to our 90 or so posts so far is almost hard for us to believe, coming in at well over 500 internal links. All of these links are contextual links, and we’re only adding them when it logically makes sense to do so.
The number of internal links so far on this site is greater than a couple of our other sites which have more than 500 posts each. The difference of course is that because the content on this site is so tightly related, there are a ton of linking opportunities.
Traffic
As expected, we haven’t seen a whole lot of traffic so far, but we are seeing at least some. The screenshot below is from Analytics and shows our organic search traffic so far.
Only a portion of the traffic from the screenshot above is coming from Google Search (pictured below). The rest is coming from other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.
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I’m not really sure why there was an initial burst of impression when we launched the site, but since it came back down near the end of November, it has been growing at a slow and steady rate.
Slight Change of Course
When we first launched this site, our plan was to only publish 150 posts, then put the site on pause to see what happens. After giving it some more thought, we decided to keep moving forward instead.
The last thing we want to do is to send a signal to Google that we’re no longer being active with the website, so we feel like it’s probably a smarter move (and better for the case study) to keep posting, even if it’s at a lower frequency.
With that being said, we’ve already planned out our topics and keywords to target for the next several clusters. We haven’t decided whether we’ll publish these at a slower rate, but either way, we’re going to keep moving forward.
Final Thoughts
We’re still only two months in at this point, so we wouldn’t expect to see much movement. However, we’re slowly ranking for more and more keywords and seeing a trickle of traffic each day, so we think we’re on the right track.
Look for another update in about a month.
