Before I get into the nitty gritty, I just want to thank the community who’ve messaged us ideas about the site, have asked us questions and just pushed us to think to that next level with this site. If you’re just interested in our stats, scroll to the end of this post.

A bit of a backstory for Zebo. We had an idea for trying to test out duplicate content, and also trying to scale something automatically, somehow Chris agreed to the idea and we got to work. Zebo.co.uk was just a domain that I had available in my collection. So we used that with no thought about domain choice.

We launched the site on the 10th of September, that’s when we started getting small amounts of traffic. We proposed a series of articles to Mark and Ann of SEO Chat to follow the progress of this site. The first one is: Can You Get Fully Automated Articles To Rank In Google which thankfully we can answer that generally as a big fat yes.

Whilst we haven’t launched any of our tests, we do have some data that we would like to share from the previous six months. I will be doing an article for SEO Chat as a follow up to the above article.

The Setup

At the start of the process, we were setup on a server shared with other projects that Chris works on. Once we got to a reasonable size (around January).

We’re now running on a server (through Cloudflares free program) at OVH.

Specs before:

CPU 3.1Ghz 4 cores
12 GB ram

Specs Currently:

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 – 4c/8t – 3.4 GHz/3.8 GHz
RAM: 32GB DDR3 ECC 1600 MHz
Disks: SoftRaid 2x2TB
Traffic: 500 Mbps guaranteed bandwidth

What We Learnt:

Google loves speed. Seems simple doesn’t it, but at the start of the process, we had some large sitemaps that we needed to be crawled, so we spent a lot of hours trying to think of ways to get more of our pages indexed.

Over these images, we did a small test. We changed how the code was being loaded. One was quicker one was slower. I previously had GTMetrix reports however these look to have been deleted. But it was a couple of seconds difference in load time.

The second image, we literally kept turning it off and on. As soon as we did that the number of requests we had from Google would increase. We had a way of manually checking too, we had a small section behind an admin login with a list of recent searches. We can see when a bot hits the site. During this time the list was being updated much quicker through the extra hits to the server on different pages.

That Ranking For Some Terms Is Easy

We had a search term right at the start that was getting a large amount of impressions and clicks, it was the term “Alice New Star”. It was driving a good amount of traffic, just it seems that it wasn’t the kind of traffic we really wanted. As you can see from the image below, there is a large amount of clicks that we achieved from this. Actual earnings was next to nothing. We removed this search term as it’s not really the kind of thing that we wanted to get traffic from. However if  anybody out there wants an easy term to rank for, enjoy.

Choose What You Want To Rank For

At the start of this process, we used tools like semrush and serpstat to find more keywords, you can see our process here: https://serpstat.com/blog/a-client-use-case-how-we-used-serpstat-to-rank-our-project/ Serpstat were amazing and actually published the article.

The problem with the above method, is that we weren’t thinking about our users at this moment in time. We were purely thinking “Great, now we’ve got a quick way to add a shed load of keywords.” which worked at the time, but we got keywords like that above that really are not suitable for our site and honestly, I think this is one of the things damaging our rankings currently.

Click-through Rate Matters

As you can see from the image below, we made a change to our meta description, I don’t have the original. However we definately went from:

“See our -product- collection at Zebo, the best way to find what you need.”

to our current:

“Discover our extensive -Product- collection at Zebo; the easiest way to find exactly what you need. Quickly search Zebo to browse only the best -Product- selections in seconds, at affordable prices”

Some fun memories:

Whilst digging through my skype history with Chris. Saw some bits that made me smile.

Such as this:

“Not doing too badly either: “

To put this into perspective, we were a month and a half into the project. That was sent on the 26th of October at 9:17 pm.

The Stats:

October:

November:

Sessions	Users	Pageviews	Pages/Sessions	Average Session Duration	Bounce Rate	% New Sessions
22,498	21,024	35,320	1.57	00:51	71.60%	92.96%

December:

Sessions	Users	Pageviews	Pages/Sessions	Average Session Duration	Bounce Rate	% New Sessions
31,018	29,103	46,271	1	00:50	67.74%	93.08%

January:

Sessions	Users	Pageviews	Pages/Sessions	Average Session Duration	Bounce Rate	% New Sessions
69,792	65,206	106,838	2	00:55	65.08%	92.61%

February: 

Sessions	Users	Pageviews	Pages/Sessions	Average Session Duration	Bounce Rate	% New Sessions
84,199	78,378	133,126	2	01:00	62.55%	91.62%

March:

Sessions	Users	Pageviews	Pages/Sessions	Average Session Duration	Bounce Rate	% New Sessions
71,833	66,897	112,013	2	00:58	0.6324	90.91%

As you can see, we’ve dropped in traffic since the Fred update. We made a post about our next steps: https://overwork.co.uk/fred-does-not-like-automated-sites/

 

Top Pages

Just a quick note, I have removed a few from here, specifically the ones which we felt we did not want to rank for and have removed from our site.

Page	Pageviews	Unique Pageviews
https://zebo.co.uk/	7520	4583
https://zebo.co.uk/stores	596	333
https://zebo.co.uk/q/onesie_with_bum_flap	507	472
https://zebo.co.uk/q/jumperoo_seat_cover_replacement	461	424
https://zebo.co.uk/q/gem_painting_tool	446	414
https://zebo.co.uk/q/trolls_costume	396	363
https://zebo.co.uk/q/hollyoaks_calendar_2017	369	351
https://zebo.co.uk/q/argos_radiator_shelf	354	298
https://zebo.co.uk/q/drop_seat_onesie	324	298
https://zebo.co.uk/q/shoe_stretcher_argos	323	267
https://zebo.co.uk/q/kirkton_house_bedding	317	281
https://zebo.co.uk/q/spare_bulbs_for_christmas_light	288	232
https://zebo.co.uk/q/christmas_pyjamas_family	284	273
https://zebo.co.uk/q/noma_replacement_bulbs	282	245

Thank you for following on this journey, any questions please just ask us below.