How I Scaled A News Website From 0 to 100k Visitors/Mo in 6 Months – SEO Case Study

I bought a domain – it was an aged domain which was a news website before and did just about OKAY to pull through. Not surprising that the owner dropped the domain after a while.

These are the questions probably in your mind right now –

• How old was the domain?

Answer: The domain was just about 6 years old

• How did you find it? How did you buy it?

I found it on expireddomains.net & sent an offer to the seller on Sedo to buy it.

• What was the niche?

General news. It was somewhat similar to thetimesnow – can’t reveal the exact name.

• What was the price of the domain?

I bought the domain for $1,500 – only because it had links from genuinely strong sites – that too, contextual links.

Now, the question is, how did I grow it? What was the strategy?

Here’s the strategy summarised in bullet points:

• Buy the domain, set up a newspaper/magazine-style theme, and create all the important pages (contact us, privacy policy, about us, fact-checking, grievances, policies, and all other important pages news sites have)
• Revive all the old pages that used to rank OR had backlinks to them – this is an important step.
• 301 the attachment files like PDFs that had links on them to the homepage
• Rebuild all the pages I can to help it look like the site it was before, 3 years back.

These steps mentioned above would probably take a decent amount of time and rightfully so, they are the ones that will help us prepare to get to the next level.

Right after this, I applied to Google News.

This is like Search Console, but for news sites. It lets Google know that you’re a publisher and all the details around that. It’s not needed but is good to have because why not.

You can do it for yourself here –

https://publishercenter.google.com/

Let’s discuss what got things moving

• Content Velocity – The number of news articles we posted daily

We pushed at least 20 news articles a day – 30% of it was original, we tried to create new topics out of the box – mostly from social media posts and creating new interesting takes.

• The originality of the news – almost 30% of it was original and got the most links naturally

We did not copy the topics/titles but covered the primary topic with a different POV. This made us stand out from the sites that straight up copy the title/topic ideas.

• Natural links from huge sites

• Covering the news/topic as soon as possible and trying to be the first one to publish it

We tried to cover events as soon as we could – by turning on notifications for posts by celebs on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. This helped us create something super fast – sometimes faster than the big publications.

We covered news about Facebook/Instagram going down as we went through it ourselves and we were the first to cover it – it helped us get links from big publications naturally – which we would have never thought of!

How is the site doing now and how much is it making?

It used to make about $2k/mo when it got to 100k/mo visitors – we did a lot of stuff to monetize the users.

The site was later sold when it was on a growth spur to get good selling multiples and the new owner eventually abandoned it – lowered the content velocity and didn’t take it seriously. Not all stories end on a positive note alas.