Greetings anon,
Welcome to the November monthly recap. Apologies for our tardiness. The last month and a half has been one disaster after another. Just an FYI that this recap will include a bit of info from the first week of December as well (since we recovered from the penalty on December 3rd). Assuming we experience no other penalties, we should be able to sell in the low 6-figure range at some point in Q1. But we need to prove the traffic is stable for at least two more months (through January) before we can think about a sale again.
Below is an outline of what we worked on this month as well as our site’s vital signs
Traffic & SEO Update
As described in our previous update, almost all of November was spent trying to undo the algo update that removed around 70% of our traffic. Because we tried so much different stuff, it’s impossible to know what “fixed” the site, but I honestly think part of it was Google realizing they made a mistake. The penalty was drastic, and so was the correction. If you don’t believe us take a look for yourself.
There were unconfirmed algo updates on November 2nd and December 3rd which line up perfectly with the spikes. Since the initial recovery, traffic is down ~3%. We are not overly concerned as we have a lot of content getting ready to be published (and republished).
We published 13 articles in November. 8 were medically reviewed by a doctor. We have 2 of our top 10 posts currently being rewritten and medically reviewed. These posts are almost 3 years old and can use a refresh. The previous owner wrote them, and while the content is high quality, refreshing them and getting them reviewed by a medical doctor could help give them a serious boost. They have also had a slight decrease in rankings since the recovery, so now seems like the right time.
Revenue Update
Obviously, with traffic down ~70%, the monthly revenue dropped. Although not nearly as much as you would think. Total revenue for November was $2,201. We definitely had higher conversion %’s throughout the month, which is likely due to increased shopping from Black Friday / Cyber Monday. Either way, it didn’t wreck our monthly rev, and we expect an ATH for revenue in December.
We did redeploy Mediavine ads back on the site and because of this, we are hitting $100 or more per day practically every day in December.
Costs Update
Total expenses for November were $1,046. As usual the biggest expense was content, although the amount we spent vs. normal went down considerably. Dev work was mainly around getting reviewed by schema set up. Expenses will be slightly lower in December and then likely double come January. Again, most of the expenses will be content focused. We are comfortable placing larger content orders since we are now confident that new pages will actually rank.
Content - $702
Dev Work - $254
Hosting - $55
Email - $34
Linkbuilding
Oof. The company we paid for the three HARO links has done an awful job. We were emailing them several times a week asking for updates and finally, they told us 2/3 links had been placed. Both were on pages of motivational quotes that had nothing to do with our niche (both links on different pages of the same domain).
We chewed them out, and they agreed to not count those links. It’s been almost a month since that happened, and still haven’t heard anything back. We asked for a refund last week if they can’t get the links by the end of the month (But we have no leverage since we already paid, so we will see what happens.)
Will not be recommending this company in the future, so if you have a HARO service you like, please let us know.
In the background, BowTiedPlug has been working on an in-house outreach campaign that we will share the details of in a future substack (hopefully before the end of the month).
We are also looking at strategic link trades with e-commerce companies in our niche. Basically, we will write a positive review of their product if they link back to it somewhere on their site. Be careful not to spam this. So far we have two legit companies we are going to do this with. Quality over quantity is extremely important when it comes to link building. These are high DA sites that get more than double our monthly traffic.
Sorry BowTiedPlug
The last month and a half has been stressful for a lot of reasons. When the site tanked BowTiedPlug and I were extremely frustrated. We spent dozens of hours analyzing data and speaking with different SEOs to try and understand what happened.
We compiled a list of actions to take which we detailed in our last update. This list was a combination of advice from 6 different SEOs. We did not automatically do everything they said, but refined the list based on what made sense. About 80% of the suggestions were from one SEO in particular. He came highly recommended with the caveat that “this dude is a total dick.”
After talking with him several times, I thought he was extremely knowledgeable (he is). He called out a lot of stuff that made sense but said the most important thing was getting the response time down. He wanted us to switch from Cloudways to Big Scouts. BowTiedPlug checked it out and didn’t want to switch because it objectively wasn’t as good.
The consultant said he’d seen several sites using Cloudways switch to Big Scouts and automatically recover. He said there is stuff behind the scenes you don’t realize and that Big Scouts was superior. BowTiedPlug was skeptical. I told BowTiedPlug I didn’t care and to do it anyway. This prompted a pretty heated exchange, which, ultimately, I won.
Guess what happened?
BowTiedPlug made the changes, and all the speed metrics got worse across the board (queue dunce hat for BowTiedWookie).
We showed the consultant what we did at which point he said that was free advice, and he didn’t study the site enough to make a real recommendation. He said after spending more time looking at it we would need to switch to his infrastructure which cost $250/month. We were paying $50/month for Cloudways and now $100/month for Big Scouts.
We asked to see the specs of the plan and he refused to provide them saying we were wasting his time and that he runs the infrastructure at breakeven to help his clients.
So we parted ways. This was a valuable lesson for a moron like me. Just because someone knows what they are talking about doesn’t mean they won’t try to screw you later. This guy gave a lot of good suggestions but ultimately was trying to reel us into paying 5x what a normal hosting plan costs.
BowTiedPlug was right. I was wrong. 😑
We have since switched back to Cloudways.
Penalty Recovery
There isn’t a lot left to say on penalty recovery. You can read everything that we did in last update, but ultimately it’s impossible to know. We need to consider everything we implemented over the last month to be “best practice” going forward and try to improve site quality as much as possible.
While we will definitely write more content, velocity is less important than quality at this point. Although I think all of our content is “quality,” that’s a subjective metric. For now it means getting articles medically reviewed by a doctor to see if they perform abnormally well. We have 10 live currently so we will likely now how this experiment worked towards the end of January.
I don’t think this is mandatory, but it’s a more honest way to build authority than just buying links. Currently, ~4% of the articles have been medically reviewed by a doctor. We should try and get this to ~15% of posts longterm (roughly 50% of traffic goes to those).
We will continue to tweak and write content over the next few months, but I think we have the site in a good place to transition as long as traffic remains stable over the next 30-60 days.
The Worst Part of This Month
In addition to all the B.S. with the site my company announced layoffs (I was unscathed see my tips for avoiding layoffs here)
However, all of that was an after thought compared to my grandfather passing away in early December. Since Halloween, he’d been struggling tremendously, and the time spent on this project (and pretty much everything else in my life) dropped considerably to be with him.
I have 0 regrets on how I spent my time, and am incredibly grateful I was in a position to maximize my time with him the during his last few weeks (a special thanks to BowTiedPlug for picking up the slack).
For those curious he did know about the site (though he would be the first one to admit he didn’t really understand it). He was not aware of my antics as a fictional cartoon Star Wars character on Twitter but I think he would have found it funny.
I know none of you come here for life advice, you come here to read about tactical SEO strategies you can implement for your own businesses. But if I can offer some life advice its this: life is shorter than you think. Make sure you are spending time with the people you care about. Don’t look back and have regret that you did not spend as much time as you should have with a loved one after they are gone.
❤️
BowTiedWookie & BowTiedPlug
P.S. If you are interested in purchasing the site let us know. We won’t formally list again until sometime in February but are open to selling before that if we get an offer that makes sense.
Sorry for your loss. Thanks for sharing that.
Sorry to hear about your grandfather. RIP. Also that consultant guy does in fact sound like a dick haha