Jordan Traveler 4-Year Report
[CASE STUDY]

“The only constant is change,” as the saying goes. I shouldn’t be surprised that this applies to the business of blogging as much as any other part of life, but I guess I still am. Sitting down to write these recaps for each site always gives me a chance to dive deep and learn something new; such is the case as we cross the four-year mark for Jordan Traveler, my, well, Jordan travel-focused blog.

The hopeful days of 2021 niche travel blogs have come and gone, (no) thanks to many Google changes in the past 18 months – but all is not lost. As time goes on, I see signs of life that give me hope to continue creating great content and helping people through what they read… at least when it comes to this site!

Okay, okay, let’s just get right to it: below you’ll find an analysis of the past 12 months of running JT and what I plan to do next, plus why I say I have hope at all.

What are these Case Studies?

As a reminder, I do case studies for almost every site I’ve created, at the 6-month, 9-month, 12-month, 18-month, and 24-month marks. If a site reaches its two-year mark and I plan to continue writing, I’ll switch to annual reports; currently, all of my sites are more than two years old.

Here are the ages of each site, and a link to the case studies I’ve written about each one:

• Valerie & Valise – 11 years
• Space Tourism Guide – 7 years
• Discover Sausalito*
• Follow the Butterflies*
• London on My Mind – 4 years
• Great Plains Travel Guide*
• Jordan Traveler – 4 years (this post!)
• Eat Like Bourdain – 3 years

*I shut down these three sites recently; read more about that decision.

Now let’s dig into the specifics of Jordan Traveler and my plans for it.

Fast Facts

Here’s a quick glance at the stats for Jordan Traveler at the four-year mark.

Date First Published	May 7, 2021
Articles Live (as of 5/1/23)	102
Publishing Cadence	Whenever 🤷🏻‍♀️
Monthly Pageviews (last month)	25,843 (Apr 2025)
Highest Pageviews (30 day max)	65,196 (Sept 2023)
Email Subscribers	283

History & Status of Jordan Traveler

Charts comparing JT (left) and LOMM (right) traffic over time since launch.

I’ve previously discussed the history of the site; I’d rather focus on the past year instead of the full four-years… I recently noticed something interesting, when looking at my April 2025 data across my sites; I’ve been saying that London On My Mind had the best recovery of any sites hit by Google’s f*ckery in 2023-2024, but actually Jordan Traveler has recovered even better!

Much like LOMM, JT started out strong, growing to its near-peak traffic in about 18 months after launch. This destination has strong seasonality, so I saw a dip in early 2023, and the same spike in traffic for this site in July/August 2023 that I saw across all of my sites – I’ve never really dug into what was going on there… (Sounds like an investigation I need to do!)

Anyway, all this to say that JT has actually done really well in the past year; May, June & July of last year were the worst months for traffic since those algorithm updates (compounded by seasonality because people aren’t planning trips to Jordan in the summer!), and since then, it’s been on a climb back up to almost half of what it was pre-updates (it has recovered 40%, whereas LOMM has only recovered 35%).

This is especially surprising to me since Jordan is, well, right next to Israel; in fact, I didn’t even realize JT had been hit by the October 2023 Core Update because it started rolling out on October 7th. (I thought that was – justifiably – causing the traffic losses.) Turns out, people still want to visit Jordan, and people are still finding my site to help them plan. Woo!

So… what now?

What’s Next?

Arguably, I should be focused on Jordan Traveler; it seems to have the best prospects of continued recovery from any of my sites that were hit – and it’s a powerful earner during its prime months, when it drives a lot of hotel bookings through Stay22.

At this point, I haven’t really been focusing on it at all though, and I am sort of struggling to muster the enthusiasm to do so. For starters, I don’t have a ton of articles on my to-write list… I do have lots of articles that could use a glow-up, but it’s so hard to get motivated for updates when there hasn’t been an ROI for spending that time. (Thanks, Google.)

Anyway… as mentioned in my Q1 accountability report, I had committed to writing or updating 1-2 articles per month, but I’ve already fallen off that train. I guess I’ll recommit to that, since the most important thing I can do is continue to keep the site healthy and enjoy whatever benefits may come. I swear, I don’t plan on becoming solely focused as a “Jordan travel blogger” though!

I’m also always stuck on whether I might see success on Instagram with reels; I have lots of great assets, but not the time or energy to create the inspiring content people want to see there. Does anybody want to help me with that? I won’t commit to a goal with this because we all know (after years of me setting goals and focus on social only to report failures!) I won’t succeed.

Do you have any other questions about this recap for Jordan Traveler? Let me know in the comments; I’m happy to share anything that I forgot to include!