SEO Project Update #4

It’s time for the last monthly SEO update of 2022 for project Jupiter. This is the 4^th update since we started this project.

We are approaching the 4 months publishing mark, which is both exciting and a little bit never-racking! On one hand, we see Google starting to give some love to the project, but we can’t help to get excited about what the next months will look like.

What we did

Project Jupiter has been making steady progress, although not everything has been easy.

Some of the experts we hired to write for us didn’t end up being a good match. Some of them simply ghosted us (it happens), while others delivered content that didn’t really add much value to the reader. When this happens, we always try our best to make things work. We give our writers feedback and try to help them improve the piece until it reaches our editorial standards, but after a couple of revisions it was clear it was going to take more editing time than it would to write the piece from scratch, so we had to let him go.

On the other hand, the two writers that have been delivering articles are getting better and better, to the point where one of them even managed to pull off a very high value, engaging, easy-to-read and understand 2000 words piece! Amazing!

So during December we only focused on managing the writers and publishing new content. We managed to publish 6 new articles.

Current state

• The site currently has a total of 23 articles published.
• We have a total of 32 pages ranking for 198 different queries! That’s a big jump from the previous 39 queries we were ranking for last month.
• And here comes the best part. Just a few days before the end of the year, we received this email from Google telling us project Sinope received 40 organic visits in the last month. We couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present!

What’s next

• Of course, the first thing we need to do is keep publishing great content. If we manage to publish 8 new articles in January that would be amazing.
• Since articles on project Jupiter are clearly on the long side, we are going to go deeper into our KW research to try to actively target several KW with each article.
• We would still like to bring on an additional writer, but we are in no rush. Since we already have two good ones we are going to take our time to find a really good one before we make any offers.
• We might not start executing it as of right now, but we would like to start thinking about a link-building strategy to give us a push in the SERPs and help those articles that are already ranking do even better.

Other general thoughts

We developed the Jupiter project using AMP to make sure they run lightning-fast. And as we mentioned in our previous update, we believe that is one of the main reasons why this site is ranking higher on mobile than it does on desktop.

We love AMP and how easy it makes it for sites to be light and fast. However, it does seem that Google, who developed AMP in the first place, does not share our enthusiasm. Why do we say this? Well, there are signs. For instance, Universal Google Analytics is being replaced by Google Analytics 4 once and for all in July 2023, and Google still has not made it compatible with AMP.

So we switched another website from AMP back to normal, paying special attention to performance, using the minimum number of plugins, manually blocking the assets we didn’t need from the plugins we did use, etc. (at the end of the day, AMP makes it easy, but it’s not the only way to make website fast). The results we’ve seen so far are surprising. Maybe not so much in traffic, but definitely in monetization (through no other than… Google Adsense!).

Anyway, all this is to say that we are considering turning off AMP on project Jupiter too. We will give our test site some time to collect data (after all Christmas is not the best time to measure anything) before we make a final decision on that.

See you in the next update!