$15 and 7000 page impressions later…

Throwing www.westkelownafires.ca up was an interesting endeavor. It took an evening to get the domain and blog up and running, and around 10 minutes of time per blog entry. All considered the website probably absorbed 8 hours of time and in the first week of being live managed to obtain 5,000+ page views, almost entirely through search engines.

This ended up being an interesting project for me. It was a great test to find out just how fast a website can be live and indexed. The domain was active almost immediately after purchase (which isn’t always the case), and it took 24 hours for the search engines to index the site and include it in the rankings for “west kelowna fires” and similar search terms.  A number of first page rankings created peak traffic on July 23rd, reaching 1,500 page impressions in a single day.

Now the topic of the West Kelowna Fires is a touchy one, but this concept, maybe we can call it opportunistic search optimization, can play a valuable roll in business strategy. Let’s say it was a different topic, a topic where homes aren’t threatened by fire and thousands of people aren’t forced out of their houses. It should also be a topic that will live longer than a month or two. Let’s say the topic is the Pine Beetle – just as devastating to our forests but at least it’s not threatening human life. You can bet your bottom dollar the situation is going to get a ton of media coverage from radio and television. And let’s assume you run a landscaping company that can easily adapt to offer services that will protect trees from the beetle. You throw up a website, pinebeetleprotection.ca, and talk about the entire story. Why the public should be concerned and what they can do to protect the trees on their property. I’ve heard of a number of solutions, from nets covering the trees to pheromones that repel the beetle. Whatever the case is, you help the site visitor understand the threat, and subtly offer your services. It’s really not as far-fetched as you might think, and I’d be more than happy to lend a helping hand.