[SEO CASE STUDY 101] Does SEO Really Work?

What happens when you take the same basic article and optimize it with 4 different levels of SEO on 4 separate websites? 

⚠️ Full disclosure, the 4 websites shown below are NOT equal.
So this is not exactly apples to apples... 

Does SEO Really Work? 

 *Screenshot taken April 24th 2023

*77,396 total views to date for Dr. Hinchey's article
"The Science Of How To Treat Lyme Disease Naturally In 2024" as of Nov 4, 2024

⚠️ In Fact...
NaturalNutmeg.com, the least productive website, Should Have An Unfair Advantage (by a lot!)
NaturalNutmeg.com is a health & wellness industry magazine that has been around for years. Therefore... they should have a huge advantage from tons of aged industry relevant health and wellness content. That should make their domain an expert authority over other domains with the same content.

Website 1) - This case study started with Dr. Myriah Hinchey paying for an advertorial in their publication for an upcoming Lyme Disease conference we were hosting.
[ 219 views ]

Website 2) - I later took the article submitted to Natural Nutmeg (when I saw it only got 30 views) and published it on the other 3 websites, first with basic SEO on LymeDiseaseConference.com, our Lyme Conference Event Marketing website.
[ 551 views ]

Website 3) - And then published it again with a homepage banner link and a little more on-page SEO on LymeCore.com, Dr. Hinchey's Natural Lyme Supplements website.
[ 1290 views ]

Website 4) - And then lastley I published Dr. Hinchey's article on TAOVitality.com, her private practice website, with max SEO efforts which included constant SEO rewriting based on Google Search Console data for weeks (without changing the meaning), enhanced video media additions and interlinking.
[ 11,811 views ]

Logically, Natural Nutmeg's version with a huge amount of aged industry content, much higher Domain Rating (DR) and a bazillion relavant backlinks from dozens of industry relevant domains should have done well from the beginning.

But Natural Nutmeg's performance was far worse? ...WHY?

Read on to learn why...