Few things are as heartwarming as a delightful SEO success story – wouldn’t you agree?
While we’ve got a couple under our belt, I wanted to shine line on one that was mostly an experiment I undertook earlier this year.
I use the word experiment in that I went about it with a hypothesis that I tested and then examined the data to see if it supported my conclusions.
In other words, I took the dive so you don’t have to.
My hypothesis: it was possible to build a top-ranking site for certain niche keywords on a fresh domain using only organic content (in this case, blogging) and no backlink strategy.
My conclusion: it certainly is possible.
The Organic-Only SEO Strategy
I’ve previously written about backlinks and whether they are the be all and end all of SEO (spoiler: they’re not).
But I really wanted to have some first-hand data to demonstrate this. I figured where better to experiment than a site of my own making. I would control all the variables and could dedicate as much time to the experiment as I felt like.
I picked a niche I really enjoy and which, to my surprise, had very few content creators out there also blogging (though I won’t tell you what it is – everyone’s allowed a few mystery hobbies).
Most of them were either on YouTube or just doing standard product releases on their websites (which were also plastered with ads and affiliate links).
My strategy going in, if I can be frank, was selfish.
I mean that, for this website, I would only do the elements of SEO that I find personally enjoyable.
This includes writing blogs, optimizing content, creating clusters with internal linking strategies, and some common sense keyword research.
To be clear, when I say “keyword research” here – I really mean “common sense.”
That is, figuring out topics I would want to read about in this niche and which I suspected others would to.
Doing so involved NO SEO TOOLs save for checking Google Analytics and Search Console, and little more than Google’s auto-complete to brainstorm topics.
To make it harder, I also refused to use any AI for generating content fast. Everything was hand-written by me.
I even tossed out the content calendar I had built – deviating from it two weeks in simply because I felt like writing about something else (I still feel like I sinned with this one, but the gods of the algorithm didn’t punish me so I must be okay this time – don’t try this at home kids).
The Results
I took a snapshot from Google Search Console 4 months in which I posted below.
You can see in the early days of March, there was very little happening. Few impressions and few clicks, but about a month in the clicks started to grow faster than the impressions.
By Summer, the site picked up steam and the click stream really grew. It was only by July when I started seeing heavy spikes of impressions after a few topics I covered early on had some industry news about them.
The big click volumes from May to June were also happening at the same time that I was writing what one might call “long form” or “evergreen” posts – big ones of over 2,000 words that cover every inch of a topic – at least once a week.
It wasn’t too surprising to see the growth, because more often than not whenever I Googled the queries I was seeing in GSC I was seeing my own links appearing in the top 3 results (using a clean browser).
All in all, if we look at this slice (and more about what came after will be covered a bit further down), it’s pretty much one of steady growth. All with simply writing content and no backlink seeking whatsoever on my fresh domain.
Not bad.
Now – a caveat.
To put these results in perspective, however, we need to consider one important element of this experience.
Because this website was covering a very niche subject for a very niche object, there was never going to be thousands of clicks coming in.
Like I said before, this was a super niche topic that even people in the larger niche under which it falls aren’t all that knowledgeable.
Those big click gains? Well, the most I could see on busy days was 15 clicks during the summer months.
As so, for a snapshot, I was picking up on average 180 clicks a month (though that first month I had like five, so more like 250ish a month.
However, that’s still something. Especially when you look at the clicks to impressions for some of my top ranking queries.
A few terms were really pumping up my impressions, even as I was ranking poorly (18 clicks out of 1,220? Yikes!)
However, for numerous queries that were pulled into Google Search Console, I was netting around 20-25% of the total clicks for those terms. So even if the total impression volume was low, I was still getting a sizeable chunk of them.
One Last Surprise
It wouldn’t be a good SEO story without a twist.
I gradually slowed down my posting schedule as I picked up more work and gigs in the summer months. Meaning, by June (my busiest month for clicks), I was posting every two weeks, and only once in all of July.
And then came the impression crash.
The impression share reached its peak in late July and then dropped off substantially. It’s bounced back a bit but still far below the summer high.
My clicks also bottomed out in August, before coming back to their previous pace.
Initially, I was convinced this all had to do with my momentum finally dying off – I had virtually stopped posting, so it was time to be punished.
However, even as I only wrote one article in August (and we’re talking late August, like last week), my clicks bounced back almost to where they were at their peak.
So, I suspect this has to do with some of the updates to the Google algorithm that went on around that time – where lots of SEOs complained about getting their traffic wiped and then recovered as Google experimented with its own results.
Conclusions and Takeaways
You can make a successful microsite site or blog-focused website that doesn’t rely on expensive or time-consuming backlink building strategies.
A few key takeaways:
- Content is still king. As long as we’re writing quality pieces that people want to read, we’ll get clicks (and even more so if the niche isn’t crowded).
- It also shows that you do not need fancy SEO tools like SEMRush or anything like that to become successful. While tools are awesome, they are not 100% mandatory for growth.
- Content calendars are great for planning, but plans can change. Going with what feels like a strong topic in the spur of the moment can be a viable strategy – especially with Google wanting to punish content that is SEO’d for the sake of SEO, while privileging reader first pieces.
- Granted, all this will be much harder to do in a high-competition niche. I lucked out by discovering there were few voices in the space. I probably could have become a top site in that niche with more output and desire to make it happen (but alas, digital marketing gigs for clients in need always take precedence over my little projects).
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