Last week, I celebrated a client's success in reaching 100k monthly organic traffic. But the SEO journey isn't always smooth. Today, I'm sharing a few missteps from my recent venture.

Six months ago, I embarked on a public case study with the new.to domain, investing $3.5k to create a travel website. Instead of my usual approach, I tried a new strategy.

Here are the three main lessons I learned:

Content Quality:

I aimed for an infinite niche: travel. The goal was a programmatic SEO site, creating numerous pages with optimized templates filled with existing data, similar to weather websites. For a deeper dive, check out my video on programmatic SEO.
I tried to scale with minimal effort, using content from various APIs and scraped data from sites like Booking and Airbnb. This led to nonoriginal and thin content.
I used OpenAI's ChatGPT to enhance content, especially FAQs. But it wasn't enough.
Google's reluctance to index many of my pages indicated content quality issues.
The takeaway? Quantity can't replace quality, especially in a niche like travel where Google values firsthand experiences.
Backlinks:

Early signs showed stagnant growth, so I shifted to demonstrating backlink purchases and HARO. I missed out on implementing a link automation strategy.
The idea was to automate outreach to establishments like restaurants, informing them of their rank on our site and encouraging them to share a link or badge. With over 7k restaurants, this could've been impactful.
Spreading Myself Thin:

There are potential improvements for the site, but I'm juggling many projects. My primary focus is on my new SEO tool, Clicks.so. With over 400 people on the waitlist, I'm excited and stressed. The goal is to offer an affordable SEO tool for beginners and intermediate users.
Balancing clients, this channel, an upcoming YouTube partnership, and Clicks.so meant New.to had to be shelved.
Your support has been invaluable. I hope my experiences provide insights for your own SEO journey. Thanks for the comments and emails of encouragement.

Catch you in the next video!

Timestamps:
0:00 Shutting down my travel site (New.to )
0:30 The main issue with the site
3:07 Backlinks
4:06 Too many things at once (Clicks.so )


Something new! (Sign up for Beta Access!)
https://www.clicks.so/

Checkout My SEO Course (SEO Mastery)
https://courses.jaume.io/

My Favorite SEO tool:
https://get.surferseo.com/iat8z3s0gj46

My website:
https://jaume.io/

Follow me on Twitter
  / jaumeros6  

‍ Connect with me
  / jaumerossalvador