The ONLY SEO CASE STUDY you ever need to read [I mean it — With proof 📈]

Will reveal the performance in the end :)

Before I dive deep into the case study (please don’t think you don’t have the knowledge to understand what I’ll talk about, promise I won’t make it anything technical, actually you’ll go out of this blog learning alot of things you didn’t expect to learn — regardless of what your background is)

SEO = Search Engine Optimization
Basically we work on the content of the website itself, find terms people use online when searching for a specific thing “keywords” then we use those terms within our website title, description, title of the page and within the website content itself.

We do other technical things too, but not important for you to know.

Third aspect is link building — basically you can consider it as a vote of authority, link building means we reach out to other relevant and authoritative websites and we ask them to mention the website we are doing the SEO for (your client or your own in this case) and to provide a link to it, when I say link, It is what you think it is! a simple hyperlink!

Then why would a link matter? because Google made it part of their algorithm, that the website that have the most relevant and high authority links is the website that its worthy to be ranked higher on search.

Just like in real life, influencers start as no bodies, and then they start hustling their way online making as much noise as possible, and then people start talking about them, and brands consider them worthy for collaboration because they have the highest number of followers..etc.

That’s it! SEO over! nothing more and nothing less, of course there’s an art of how to do each of the things above, and not everyone doing SEO knows what they are talking about, but as a job, it’s literally what I said above, so it’s not rocket science, and I’ve done it full time (8 hours every single day) for 8 years that’s 9,600 hours (without weekends), and I’ll remove 1,600 hours just for the sake of holidays and annual leaves, so that leaves me with 8,000 hours of SEO work.

Ok by the time I reached writing here, my goal was to go search how many hours needed to become an expert at a topic, put the screenshot for you to grab your attention and show you that I know what I’m talking about so you need to listen. BUT! turns out it’s 10,000 hours YIKES!

What to do now? okay plan B!

Listen I may not be an expert 😂, but I’ve worked 8,000 on something that is as simple as the concept above, so I must be at least capable of providing some value, no? 🤷🏽‍♀️

Okay lets start the case study.

It started in February 2023, Generative AI (Open AI — ChatGPT) was just starting to become mainstream, it was released on 30th of November, 2022 so by the time people started using it and knowing the capabilities of it and it took the world by a storm, it started becoming the main topic in every conversation, especially us people who work in Digital.

I was at the time working in a digital marketing agency, and it was my responsibility as the innovation lead to be always updated on the latest technologies, tools..etc. and I have to share the knowledge/train the team.

So I did what I do best, NERD THE HELL OUT OF CHATGPT! I spent hours, in my working day, on my weekends, didn’t leave a group, a channel, an indiehacker discussion, reddit subreddits that I didn’t follow to keep up with what’s happening! as the speed of development was insanely fast! we couldn’t keep up! you go to sleep, wake up to see yet another innovation that took the world by a storm. WHAT!!!

So we as SEOs, someone who does the things mentioned above, we are threatened, very threatened! we will be redundant!

it’s true! we will! and it’s not far away from now btw, but if you live in the middle east then it will take more time than the other places (like UK or US) not because the UAE its not developed enough, no its even more developed than those countries and we have even better talents than the ones abroad, but the mentality of the people is still not really tech savvy, so a hiring manager would still want to read your CV on a paper even if they can have it as pdf on their laptop, they still want you to drive across town to do a meeting in person to speak for 10 minutes when you could’ve done it online and saved them the transport cost, they still want to hold tight to their old mentality of how work should happen.

But some don’t — some are keeping up and alot of people now I see on Linkedin who they bring me so much joy to see Arabs, that are so open minded, innovative and disrupting industries right and left on a global scale.

but still that doesn’t change the fact that it‘l happen, now wether in a year or five, we are becoming redundant it’s bound to happen, so if you do SEO, you have now enough time to develop other skills, diversify your income sources, start those tiny side hustles, you may think it doesn’t bring you enough cash for you to worry about it, true! but when you become redundant, you’ll need every bit of cash! so start strategizing now for your next move, as this is happening, it’s not only my point of view, no! I’ve read alooot to reach this conclusion so it’s public knowledge, go research it yourself.

Anyways back to my story, so there was fear that we will become redundant, and there was the opposing view of no way we will become redundant because Google will not allow people to abuse AI content and thus will always favor human written content, a month later or two maybe march or April 2023, Google announces that they don’t mind AI content as long as it serves the best content possible to answer that user query, along with ensuring there’s no keyword stuffing, no nonsense content just to manipulate search…etc.

Our SEO head of department, she was an amazing person, I’ll never work with anyone who’s as supportive as her, and even though she always allowed me to go and experiment doing whatever I want to do (she literally created that SEO — Innovation Lead role for me as it didn’t exist before) so she believed in my skills, she saw how innovative I can be and she supported that! BUT! the discussion here and what we agree on if we use AI content or if we carry on using inhouse content resources would impact the clients directly, as Google might one day wakeup and decide, you know what! we are against AI content, BOOOOOM!! manual penalty! (It happened in March 2024 :) so she was farsighted, instead of telling us yes go use AI content because it’s better than humans, she said you can use it to get ideas for content, or maybe to get the structure of the content, but still the content needs to be written by humans as we’re anyways charging the client for that.

And that’s what happened, But! that’s my day job, and whatever my boss say I’ll end up following, not because she’s a dictator, lol not at all! the opposite of that, but because she always saw things from a more sensible perspective that me to be honest I didn’t see as I’m driven by passion and trial and error and curiosity 🤷🏽‍♀️

Anyways so I was like, okay…I’m not allowed to use AI content at work, but I want to play around with it on my personal time, back then I was also interested in Niche websites, one of my side hustles that I wanted to start, and if you follow along my articles by now there’s one common thing, HOW MUCH OF A NERD I AM!

if I put my mind to something, I become obsessed with it! so I was so interested in Niche websites, especially that it was easy to do, now there’s ai to write the content, and I have all of my experience in SEO that I can make sure everything I’m doing is as optimal as possible, plus I can build fully operational wordpress websites in as little as 2 hours (I’ve built enough for my failed businesses- that now I can use Elementor with my eyes closed 😂)

So Niche websites experts, one that I admire and follow the most (on X):
@nichesitelady

She was initially an SEO like me, barely making ends meet, but she got into the niche websites realm years ago, years before the AI hype and she reached a place today where she’s so good at what she does that one month she was making 80k pounds a month! can you imagine that number from a blogging website? just relying on adsense ads and affiliate?

Also here’s her latest financial update (she shares that in her email newsletter on a monthly basis)

And here’s actual numbers from last month:

Mind you, this is after the Google disasterous AI algorithm update that happened in March, and it destroyed the websites entirely, majority of wesbites were absolutely wiped from the index, imagine one day you’re making millions next day you make zero. as simple as that!

So Nichesitelady is making $44,497 from one website on a monthly basis and she was making double that pre-march 2024.

I was mind blown, I became obsessed!
Finding a relevant niche to start is not about passion, its not about interest, well it can be! optimally it should be! but what you like and what your passion is might be a niche that is over saturated on search, so if you start a blog in that niche you will never ever rank, you may not even be indexed by Google, so it should happen in a smarter way.

I used Google Ads keyword planner, Put the location to Global, and I put the language in Arabic, why? because as an Arab it’s been my life long struggle to find good Arabic content on search, so I know exactly how massive is the gap in content quality between English and Arabic, and I can see it first hand, really bad Arabic websites ranking position 1 and 2 on search, while you can never find such a thing in English, so it’s easier for me to compete in Arabic.

So I start doing my research, testing alot of ideas seeing if there’s search volume for related keywords to validate my idea, and if there is, I’d go on Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and I search for that keyword and see what appears, and how good these websites are, can I beat them?

so I kept on doing that, until I landed on a gold mine! education, mainly universities, Arabs are searching for universities world wide related keywords, but the websites available are so weak, BOOOM! let’s do it.

So I identify a pattern in search, and when I say a pattern it’s a way that people that use in their search, example the winning ones I identified are:

Cost to study in X university
Admissions requirements in X university
Information about X university
Scholarships in X university
Available majors in X university
X University location

the name of the university doesn’t matter, because regardless of what university, this is what the people use to search.

So I take that structure and put it as the skeleton of how my product page would be (product page would be in my case is university page) so these you see above are the headers of the sections.

I go scrape ‘Topuniversities.com’ identifying the top thousand university names, I build formulas on Google sheet and then I connect OpenAi chatgpt API, and before I know it I have full content of 1300 university pages exactly.

I create another formula to pull for me the social profiles and website link for each of those websites, to enhance the user experience by giving them access to futher infromation (because I know the information I provide is horrible 😂)

And another formula to pull for me the google maps links direction to that university location.

And I use one of the scraping tools that I have to go pull for me a picture of that university campus.

By now I have all the elements I need to build those pages, so I go structure it all in the right way, and use WP-allimport plugin to import that file and BOOOOOM!!! I have a website with 1,300 university pages.

I created category pages for each city/country and automatically pulled the relevant universities into each.

added breadcrumbs & other similar universities (logic is based on same city) which would provide internal links between the pages, as I wasn’t planning to do link building work for it at all, especially that the content I created is February 2023 content! so you can imaging how horrible that content was the begining of AI before any updates happened.

and then once I saw my website is ready, I forgot how much that took me, as I may have procrastinated quite alot and got distracted quite alot, but honestly the above all from building the website to everything else, I can do it in one weekend if I was focused on it.

Anyways so I publish my Niche website, create google search console and google analytics accounts for it and link them so I can monitor performance.

I waited for few days, Google wasn’t picking up my website, I googled solutions and found there is a way to use Google Index API (Google advises against this, so don’t take my advise and go do it) it’s just what I’ve done 🤷🏽‍♀️

It allows you to request indexing of 200 pages at a time, so I do that over 1 week, I’ve requested my entire website to be indexed.

And then I leave it, and I forgot about it, I check once a week the performance, and I can see that It’s growing and growing but it’s growing slowly then after 5–6 months the growth didn’t stop, so it became more and more, I was shocked! the content is HORRIBLE! but on Google analytics I keep on seeing alot of people are returning users, I had no clue what are they returning It’s HORRIBLE! but this goes to show you how bad the other websites are.

I was like okay, let me see what my users want, I add a contact form, and BOOM within 1 hour I start receiving messages, people asking for themselves or for their kids for X university…etc. people need help! there are leads! leads that I can sell! because I can’t serve them myself and I have zero interest anyways.

but I never responded, and that was 6 months ago (yes I know not the best customer service) but this website was a test! it wasn’t a business that I wanted to do, especially after I’ve got the minimum traffic threshold for Google Adsense, and I applied for their program to be able to display ads — they rejected my website, Ahhh yet another rejection so when that happened I actually was sad, and I lost all interest in that website and all of my dreams of becoming the next niche site lady, died.

but I was already paying hosting for god knows how many websites of my useless never launched business ideas, then might as well leave this website as it’s already generating traffic, why kill it!

Back then I was making 10k a month organic sessions! that’s not a small number, I was managing at the agency, clients with massive brand names and they drive 3k organic sessions a month, and those people have paid ads budget, PR..etc. and yet they couldn’t get 10k, why? because my website is competing in a land where there’s no competition so people whether they like it or not, they will come to my website as they are searching for questions that no one else is answering, but my horrible AI content does!

I started traveling all around and got busy with life and my own challenges and I completely forgot about this website, but whenever I check, the performance was always going higher and higher, without me touching or doing anything!

And then the Google AI algorithm update happens and alot of websites wayyy better than mine, english websites with millions of monthly visits, killed on spot. but what did I tell you in the beginning of my blog? Google is not as advanced yet in Arabic as it is in English, so yes my website was impacted, the performance dropped, but it dropped only for few days/week and then I started recovering (without me doing anything).

That move that Google did, pissed off so many Ad networks, as those ad networks were relying on the niche websites to display their ads! so one of the biggest names “MediaVine” — one that is very hard to get accepted to, and requires if I’m not mistaken a minimum of 30k monthly sessions..etc.

They go and announce that they are creating a new program “Mediavine Journey” its a program for small publishers, and they will accept if you have 10k sessions a month (I was here making above 20k organic visits a month) so I go and apply, thinking what have I got to lose, this is April 2024, they get access to your analytics and they monitor the website performance, if it matches their criteria they **may **approve you (I wasn’t counting on being accepted knowing that I was rejected by Adsense), I follow up after a month in May 2024, they say there as alot of demand and I’m not the only small publisher, there are thousands, so things are taking time to evaluate.

But here let me mention that my website performance is still going higher and higher, it’s crazy! I started appearing for featured snippets (alot of them!) for those who don’t know, it’s postion zero on the search result page, the one box that appears on top of everything else , CRAZY!!!!!

June 17, 2024, I was awake at 4 am in Kenya while on vacation, working on a freelancing task, I get an email saying I’ve got accepted, WOW! the universe works in mysterious ways indeed! I couldn’t believe my eyes!

I was busy with other things that I didn’t have time until now to activate ads on the website, but I decided before doing that, I’ll go revamp that website entirely, here’s my action plan:

1. I’ve got a freelancer, and I asked them to go generate new content for each page, QA it and ensure the website link and social links all are functioning (not the case now at ALL) and ensure every listing have a proper image.

2. I had so many ideas and content sections on the website that would generate me way more traffic, I’ll do that in bulk same approach as before.

3. Fix the UX, I haven’t spent any efforts on this website because I never really cared, but now I do!

4. Add contact forms customized for every university then go find partners in every city, the agents that work with university students to get them admission, I’ll partner with them and funnel my leads to them and get paid for those leads.

5. Create opportunities to use affiliate programs, examples I have in mind:
   Booking.com — creating pages where to stay next to X university ( use affiliate links to hotels in that area)
   Amazon — best laptops for students, and such content ideas that I can use affiliate links inside.

The possibilities are endless!

Are you ready now to see the performance of my website? (can’t even put enough emphasis of how horrible the content is), but allow me to blow your mind:

The performance ever since launch:

I’ve hidden the actual keywords because i don’t want competition — But this is just a little snippet of hundreds that I rank position 1 for!

So what do we learn from this case study:

1. If you work in Digital, no matter if it’s SEO or any other field, go play around, learn, don’t listen to your boss, do what you want to do on your own website, actually put your knowledge to test to see would it work on a brand new website if it wasn’t a well known brand like the one you manage at your day job?

2. Hiring managers/recruiters, stop asking candidates silly questions, I’d start asking what they do in their free time over what they did at a previous job, because if you’re looking for nerds, then oh boy what we do in our free time! lol! basically the case study you saw above 😂!

3. If you want someone who’s unconventional, someone that push boundaries and doesn’t play by the book, someone who loves keeping up with latest technologies, then I’m the person you’re looking for!

Reach out and let’s see if it’s a match:
linjabri@gmail.com

***My rates are not cheap at all **— so don’t reach out unless you are willing to pay really goood money, because such experience and knowledge, didn’t come out of nowhere! I literally spent 8000 hours to get it! so if you want cheap work, Linkedin have enough people, but I’m not one of them 🙂

Hope you enjoyed reading this one! and keep an eye for the next one! (won’t be SEO related 👀)