SEO Project Update #5

Welcome to the 5th update of our Jupiter SEO project.

The last update was an exciting one, with Google starting to send some traffic our way. We are happy to say that trend has only got better during January. But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves. Let’s start where we always do.

What we did

As you know, our writers aren’t actually writers, they are professionals in the field we cover. This means they have their own jobs and responsibility, which they had to catch up with too after the holidays. All this to say it took us a little bit longer than we would have liked to get things rolling again, but once we did we managed to publish 5 excellent articles.

One of these articles actually made it to the first page of the SERPs in just a week!

We also expanded our keyword research and came up with a completely new cluster to target which shows potential. The thing is, none of our writers has experience in that particular cluster, so we started looking for someone who does. We have a couple of leads, but nothing certain just yet. Hopefully we will be able to start working on this cluster next month, but there’s no guarantee.

Now, remember how last month we mentioned we wanted to start thinking about a possible link-building strategy? Well, we didn’t get to it, BUT, we did get our first backlink! Totally organic, from a .org.nz website with a DA of 19.

Current state

• The site currently has a total of 29 published articles
• We have a total of 37 pages ranking for 520 different queries. Another big jump from the previous 198 queries we were ranking for last month!
• SERPs spread:
  • 2 queries in the #1 position
  • 6 queries in the top #5
  • 15 queries in the top #10
  • 30 queries in the top #30

• Backlinks: 1
• During this month the site received a total of 127 organic visits from Google

• Last but not least. Not sure if you’ll remember this, but one of the conditions of this challenge was that the majority of the organic traffic had to come from the US. Well, this is how the traffic by country is looking so far:

What’s next

• Publish 6 to 8 articles
• Hopefully find the right person to work on the new cluster we want to cover
• Think about that link-building strategy (or not! Since we got our first backlink not thinking about it! Haha!)

Other thoughts

Infinite scroll Google SERPs

It is typically considered ranking in the top #10 as being on the first page of Google’s results.

That was definitely true a long time ago.

However, since Google started throwing in videos, featured snippets, suggestions, and other things into the results page, that number stopped being fixed. With all those, sometimes you only get 6 or 7 organic results on the first page, which meant reaching the 10th position started making less of a difference, and 5th was the new 10th.

With that in mind, a common strategy many SEO experts, including us, use, is to look at articles ranking 8th to 15th and try to improve them in some way, hopping those improvements will make them gain a few positions on the SERPs and actually put them on the first page.

That would definitely be something we would start experimenting with on project Jupiter, if we were writing this a few months ago.

The thing is, Google has just rolled out infinite scroll. This means bye-bye to the concept of SERP pages. Now you only get one results page, and can simply scroll and scroll and more results will keep automatically appearing. 

We are not sure yet what this will mean for those pages ranking #8 to #15. Maybe more people will get to them since that won’t require clicking on the “next” button, or maybe it’ll have no impact at all.

Since this update has been very recent, we’ve decided to hold off on updating those articles for a little bit until we better understand the impact of this change.

See you in the next update!