An SEO Experiment

In early January 2010 HSTinCanada.com went live after some educated estimates and two weeks of design & testing with a single goal in mind – obtain visitors from search engines. After operating for two months with 50+ articles and a variety of links from other websites, the website has cracked the first page for a handful of key search phrases in Google. What is unique about HST in Canada as a topic in general is that it’s going to receive plenty of news coverage for an extended period of time. Back in the summer of 2009 I launched a quick website for a news topic that was in the news headlines for a week. With $15 dollars invested for hosting and the domain name, www.westkelownafires.com launched and recorded 7000 page views over the course of a few days, with 90% of the web traffic coming from search engines. Ever since that SEO Experiment, I’ve contemplated the potential for what might be called “opportunistic web development”. Then the next opportunity presented itself…

Starting from scratch with a brand new domain and using the wordpress platform, a website was born with the intention of being a neutral resource for a hot topic with varying opinions and feelings. The proposed Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) is coming to British Columbia and Ontario on July 1st 2010, and while it has a number of implications for businesses and citizens within these provinces, it presented a unique opportunity for a website. It was going to be on people’s minds over the next several months, and the media coverage it will receive will only intensify as groups, businesses and governments become more vocal.

For starters, any successful website must serve a valuable purpose. In the case of HSTinCanada.com there was a distinct gap in available information online. The provincial government’s in support of HST have the pros related to the HST explained on their websites. The anti-HST government websites & groups have all of the negative aspects of HST explained. There was no single source that talked about both the pros and cons of HST, so the content strategy for HST in Canada was easy to establish. Secondly, as the goal was to obtain search engine traffic, an assessment of the competing websites and an estimate of how much search volume exists was undertaken. Overtaking the competing websites isn’t insurmountable and the number of HST related search engine queries is promising.

After being live for nearly 2 months, HSTinCanada.com is on track to serve approximately 30,000 ad impressions in March 2010. With further improved search engine rankings, this topic has the legs to serve 1 million ad impressions from search engine traffic alone before July 1st, 2010.

The message here is two fold. For web publishers and businesses of all kinds, a niche website built around a current event or relevant topic optimized for search engines can gain a strong audience over the course of  a few months. Think outside the box – sometimes your current website isn’t ideal when reacting to an evolving situation. Web development is more accessible now than ever, and a ground-up website build might not cost as much as you think. Perhaps a tax advisory firm or an accounting office should have launched a website like HST in Canada – once you obtain the audience you can display whatever ads you want, even your own. Not only that, publishing web content around a certain topic solidifies your identity as an authority on the topic – trust = sales. Forgive me, but the second part of this message is blatant self-promotion – if you think there’s an angle you can use to amass an audience related to your business and want some advice on it’s potential and how to execute, please get in touch! I love doing this stuff!