SEO Case Study: My Forking Life

Have you heard that ads aren’t good for SEO? Well that is definitely not true and Mediavine loves SEO.

Search engines are still what fuels traffic to Mediavine’s O & O sites, so everything we do with ads keeps SEO as the focus. Read more about how Mediavine ads play nicely with SEO in Eric’s post.

SEO and pagespeed are two of Mediavine’s top company passions, which we love sharing with our publishers via our Facebook lives, help center, social media and blog posts like our ultimate SEO checklist and other SEO resources. When you grow and win, we also win!

This is why we love sharing our Case Studies, which focus on how our publishers leverage Mediavine’s SEO, pagespeed tools and settings to rank higher in search engines, boost traffic and earn even more with their ads.

Today we are excited to introduce you to Tanya of the blog My Forking Life. She’s here to tell us about her SEO strategies. Welcome to the blog, Tanya!

How long have you been blogging? When did you join Mediavine?

About 3 years. I joined Mediavine in April 2018.

What is your current ad density setting in the dashboard for desktop and mobile? Why did you choose this setting?

Mobile – high
Desktop – medium.
These are the default settings. I haven’t had any complaints about the ads and I’m a believer that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Plus…it’s not that many ads and they aren’t intrusive.

What are you currently averaging in page speed per Google Page Speed Insights?

Mobile -66
Desktop – 94

When did you start focusing on SEO and/or site speed?

February 2018

How has working with Mediavine impacted your SEO, site speed and site overall?

It’s been great! I’ve read all the blog posts and watched the videos from the previous Mediavine Conferences on Youtube. (Editor’s Note: You can find all of our past conference videos on the Mediavine YouTube channel.)  I learned a ton about SEO by doing that. The lazy loading has helped my site speed.

As far as overall, I love the money I’m making and it encourages me to continue to provide valuable content to my audience. My philosophy is that people won’t be bothered by ads if the content is great.

What steps have you taken to improve your SEO and/or site speed? What resources/tools have you used?

I keep plugins to a minimum if I can for site speed and I lazy load my images with WP Rocket. For SEO, podcasts are my friend. Thanks Theory of Content and maybe luck?

Are you taking advantage of any of the site speed tools offered by Mediavine, like Optimize Ads for Mobile or Desktop Pagespeed? If yes, which ones?

Yes. All of them.

Did you find any Mediavine resources useful as you optimized your site speed or SEO? Specific help docs, blog posts and/or YouTube videos? Please list them.

Yes, the Youtube videos from the Mediavine Conference. Especially the Theory of Content one.

What advice do you have for someone who would like to increase their organic search traffic?

Keyword research and write about what people are looking for. And make it freaking great. Then interlink, interlink, interlink.