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!

$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.

Search engine experiment success!

Back in February I started a new “experiment” website covering the little maqui berry native to Patagonian region of South America.  This isn’t a new concept for me, in July of 2007 I started an experiment website covering the acai berry. The acai berry exploded with popularity and suddenly my site had a ton of competition – which makes ranking well in the search engines for a 2-3 hour per week hobby very difficult. So I decided to level the playing field when I heard about the maqui berry, a berry that reportedly has a higher antioxidant concentration than the acai berry with much less hype and media coverage – therefore less competition.

But that’s enough background – to the point. In it’s 4th month of existence www.maquiresource.com is now ranking on the first page for “maqui berry” in Google. The new goal? Improve that 9th place ranking into the top 3. That top 3 position can be the difference between hobby revenue and revenue that might actually help me make my car payments every month

Maqui Berry Resource

I’ve started a new website to cover all things about the maqui berry. After running Acai Resource since July, 2007 and seeing that niche grow from <100,000 pages in Google to 6 million pages in Google, I wanted to start a new site on a related topic that didn’t have quite so much competition in Google. The maqui berry grows in Patagonia, versus the acai berry in the Amazon Rainforest. There are many similar qualities between the two berries, but what makes the maqui berry stand out is it’s amazing antioxidant levels – it boasts an ORAC score higher than any known fruit, so I have high hopes for this new berry. None the less, Acai Berry Resource will remain a priority.

Competition is everywhere…

Yet, there are some places less competitive than others. Of course I mean this from a web development, search engine optimization perspective.

I’m not going to get into the details, but after meeting with an old friend who was visiting from Germany , an idea crept into my head. Maybe my hobby website, Acai Resource, would be of interest in Germany. I’m not too sure how information travels from country to country, but what I do know is there is 1/10th the competition for the German equivalent of the acai berry. I’m having difficulty getting the site to rank well for “acai” and “acai berry” – when I started the site there was very little competition, but then the acai berry got some good press and overnight the competition in Google doubled. Although there are some longer phrases that perform well for the website, I’m not content with sitting on the 10th page for “acai”. So I’m trying a new angle – lets see if climbing to the top of google.de is a worthwhile endeavor.