Today we are sharing with you a case study from Axel Hansson, an SEO consultant and webmaster who was able to grow his website's monthly revenue from $11 000 to $23 000 within one year together with his twin Svante Hansson.
In this case study, we are looking at the changes they made within the period of 12 months from January 2020 to January 2021 that led to the increase of the website's monthly earnings.
Website’s Background
Axel and Svante started this website, Buffert.se in 2016. The website is in the finance information niche and it also has some travel guides (YMYL niche). The twins started this site by adding a bunch of finance guide articles, and they managed to increase the traffic from 200 visitors/ month in 2016 to 150 000 visitors/ month in 2021.
Right from the start, they outsourced most of the website’s content and ensured that their articles target some good keywords in their niche. One thing to note is that this site is a Non-US site but a Swedish site. So the language and targetings are set up for Sweden.
Traffic Growth
The website has seen a steady increase in traffic every year. The image below shows the statistics comparing the traffic received in January 2020 and January 2021.
Traffic Sources
The website was running fully on organic traffic until 2019 when they bought a few backlinks and also decided to experiment with Google Ads campaigns to promote the pages with affiliate links.
The Google Ads campaigns have been successful for Axel and Svante as they’ve been able to have an average of about 100% ROI monthly.
Content
Axel and Svante outsourced most of the content on the site and recently, they have hired a full-time employee to take care of editing and publishing the content. This has enabled them to have more articles published on the site without slacking.
Currently, his site has a total of 204 000 words, and here are the stats of the words added per month between January 2020 to January 2021.
Revenue
Axel and Svante monetize this website with 3 different affiliate programs and AdSense. The affiliate programs are in the personal loans, business loans, and insurance verticles. The reason why they chose AdSense over other ad companies like Mediavine is that AdSense has more ads targeting the Swedish audience, unlike Mediavine or Ezoic where more ads are for the English-speaking audiences.
The website's revenue has been increasing gradually over the years to the point where it broke the $20 000 point in January 2021 where it made exactly $23 771. This was a 2x increase when compared to the $11 385 it made in January of the previous year.
Here are a few details of January 2021 earnings:
Income:
- Affiliate Income: $23 221
- AdSense Income: $550
- Total: $23 771 (vs $11 385 in January 2020)
Expenses:
- Content: $1 100
- Google Ads: $4 200
- Staff cost: $450
- Total: $5 750
Profit: $18 021
Maintaining a Strong Ranking on Google as a YMYL Website
Axel and Svante’s website is under the Your Money Your Life niche. The term YMYL originated from the Google Quality rater guidelines (page 10). In it, they define YMYL as a "topic that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety."
Google highly moderates the ranking of websites under this niche. In order to have a strong position, Google advises following the EAT values — which are Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
So to thrive in this space, Axel and Svante have had to make a lot of EAT improvements on their website to stay on Google’s good side.
In order to meet EAT requirements, these are the key improvements the twins had to make:
- Added author profiles and bios.
- Introduced About us and privacy policy pages — and updated them heavily.
- Added transparency on the advertisement(s).
- Updated the most important articles with sources and information on when the article or specific section was updated.
- Pushed more brand links to the homepage.
Moving Forward
Axel plans to focus more on improving the content as they are soon reaching the limit on the number of money articles they can create. By improving old content, Axel believes that the website’s conversion rate will increase. This will also help them to get more traffic since Google seems to prefer content that's regularly updated.
