GETTING STARTED
THE STUDY
Our objective is to create a website from scratch, following along each step of the way as SEO is implemented to grow an organic audience.
The objective of this case study is to quantify 515Hosting’s SEO expertise by launching a new website that competes in search results in as little time as possible. It’s important to release case studies, because in addition to providing measurable results and proof of methodologies, case studies also provide opportunities to learn and test.
My goal is to build the general concept of the site within one weekend, submit the website to Google and then begin the process of building upon the template I’ve created to expand the site. Meanwhile, I aim to follow the growth of the site and record what I monitor here.
Throughout the course of the Case Study, I’ll update this post with a dated entry and relevant information pertaining to the traffic the site is generating via organic search traffic.
You can always view the live version of the website here
about The Site
FieldAgentResource.com aims to be a knowledge base and community forum website focused on field agent work within the gig economy.
It’s built on WordPress using the Astra theme with wpForo as the primary plugin for forum implementation. I’ve used almost exclusively Gutenburg editor for page layouts with some additional CSS tweaks.
One of the main challenges I ran into the wpForo was that it’s search features were entirely separate from the main WordPress search due to differences in how the plugin handles queries in the database, so one of the unique challenges right away was solving how to handle user searches in one consolidated search bar. I opted to use Google’s Programmable Search service with a custom redirect and URL query-string to display relevant search results on an embedded results page.
I also opted to leverage a CDN with Bunny.net and caching via WP-Optimize to help boost the speed of the site. wpForo offers caching for signed in users.
Lastly, I’m using a couple other plugins, like Author’s Box, Simple Blog Stats, Trending Posts, and Advanced Ads to handle other aspects of the site.
What is the source of revenue for the website?
In addition to the case study tracking organic traffic success from the site, I also want to track growth in advertising revenue from Google Adsense. Because Adsense requires a review and has certain requirements for acceptance into the program, I opted to finish the general layout of the site as well as upload 5 posts that I felt were detailed enough to elicit an approval from their review team.
Update: I requested the review for the website on 11/22/2024.
11/02/2024 – Initial Content Creation
Today, I registered the domain name fieldagentresource.com and began work on building the site. Over the course of the next few days, the goal is to release 4 blog posts to fill out the 4 columns of my “App Review” section on the home page.
I have a general layout for these reviews that includes a heading for each main point I’d like to cover. I can then duplicate this template for each subsequent review. Additionally, I’m leaving myself space at the top of the review to have a YouTube video placeholder, but I’ll plan on creating the associated video with each article at a later date.
In addition to the 4 articles, I also want to write my cornerstone content. This is my major article that I aim to be an “Ultimate Guide”. In addition to being linked to from the Orange Button in my header as a key location for visitors, the article is also designed to be a strong competitor in search results. I’ve fleshed out the article as much as I could on the topic and then again will include a video at the top and several images throughout, much like I’ve done on the review articles.
The Ultimate Guide is also going to be an area I link from quite significantly to other areas of the site. As I write more articles, I want to key in on areas of this guide and then link out from it to those articles.
11/10/2024 – Submission to Google
Today, I finished up my final piece of initial content I wanted to have ready to go before I set the site to be available for crawling. At this point, I have a home page with a general structure (though some areas will take shape as content is added to the site), an about page, a contact page, and 5 articles.
I have submitted the site to Google via the Google Search Console through a combination of submission of sitemaps (both RSS and XML versions) and also performed an inspection on the URL https://www.fieldagentresource.com to ensure it was accessible to Google.
With the URL available, I’ve confirmed the site can be crawled by Google and should hopefully start showing up in SERPs very soon. Although I’m assuming Google will start to work on indexing the site regardless, I also click the Request Indexing button as this makes a direct request to Google to update their crawlers with new information about the site as the last time their crawlers visited (which is likely never for a brand new site with 0 links to it) is probably outdated.
11/12/2024
The First Visitors
11/22/2024 – Total Clicks: 2
I’ve spent most of the last week working on some behind the scenes type stuff: settings, settings, settings.
I also wanted to be a little patient and see what results we were getting just from the initial content. We’re off to a good start! Only two days after submitting the site to Google, it’s already developing organic traffic. My goals going forward are to release more content in an effort to give the site even more substance, because one of the detractors at this point will be a relatively high bounce rate. I think the content as written is good and people will find it, but if the site feels empty, people won’t want to stay.
