From 79th to 1st

Search engine optimization is often overlooked by marketers simply because it is unfamiliar. You can’t buy search engine results, there’s no guaranteed results for your investment and seeing results isn’t immediate.

I recently conducted a small SEO project for a client I work with and wanted to share the process on my blog – the client has been gracious enough to allow me to share the results. If you’re not already, it’s time to start working SEO into your online plan, and I hope this post demonstrates why.

Big White Ski Resort is a popular family ski destination and if you want to take your family skiing over the Christmas holidays, now is the time to consider booking. With Christmas bookings as the goal, I began researching Christmas related terms and search trends. “Christmas Ski Holidays” is a popular search phrase in Google and Big White had already designed a great Christmas holidays landing page. I won’t get into the finer details of the optimization process, but I can say at the beginning of the process bigwhite.com ranked 79th in Google.ca for “Christmas ski holidays”. One month later after fairly minimal optimization efforts, bigwhite.com ranked #1 for that phrase in Google.ca and now has a great chance to receive thousands of qualified leads per year to their website.

The issue organizations have to be ready to face is that#1 search results are up for grabs. You may reach #1 for a desired phrase only to be bumped off that top spot a month later by a competitor. However, an SEO consultant can assess the competition and identify niches that have relatively little competition. The best approach is to come up with a budget and educate an SEO consultant about your business. From there proper tactics can be planned out.

You can take the easy route and buy Google Adwords beside the phrases you’re after, but it’s fairly common for those ads to receive less than 5% of the traffic that is searching for the particular phrase. Granted it’s a “safer” and you can guarantee your results to an extent – it’s a great place to start your online advertising and makes sense for many organizations – but the real success will always be found in strong, organic search results.

Writers Wanted

In January of 2010 I launched HST in Canada (www.hstincanada.com) with the help of a friend and colleague Isaac Oslund. There are 2 main reasons why this website was launched. Firstly, unlike client projects, I can discuss the results of this project freely here on my blog – you could call it a “proving ground” project. It’s a tool I can use to demonstrate the opportunity that exists through writing online. Secondly, the discussion around harmonized sales tax was growing and the web was under-served on the topic; someone had to step up and fill the niche.

Identifying the niche was the first order of business. Before HSTinCanada.com there were three types of websites that were posting information about HST. Government party websites, news outlets and anti-HST websites. There didn’t seem to be a single website that talked about both Ontario and BC, nor was there a website that didn’t have an agenda. There were HST supporting websites and HST opposing websites – there was no neutral source of information where a worth while discussion could take place.

Thus, HSTinCanada.com was born and 6 months later the website is closing in on 100,000 page views per month. In those 6 months over 70 strategic articles have been written and hundreds of comments have been posted. With advertising revenue the website is generating some welcomed extra income and it will be a valuable web entity for quite some time to come.

You may be asking why I’m posting this here – the reason is simple. Blogging exploded onto the scene – anyone and everyone setup a website about their lives, their hobbies, etc. The problem with this approach was the content wasn’t usually written strategically, or the blog structure itself didn’t help the website rank in search engines. This doesn’t mean the writer wasn’t talented, it simply means the writer wasn’t focused on optimizing the website for search engines. Furthermore, we’ve seen local newspapers, magazines and other printed periodicals closing their doors or struggling to remain in business. Now we see select blogs maintained by one individual raking in 6 figures per year, sometimes 7 figures. The landscape has changed for written content, and now is the time to take advantage of the situation.

I’m dedicating some time to replicating the HSTinCanada.com process with a variety of topics by working with passionate, skilled writers. Instead of writing the content, I will simply be working with writers to guide the content and start the website on the right foot. I will create and host the website and show the writer how to post articles to the site – all the technical stuff will be taken care of. As these projects launch I will be writing about them here – I already have a couple lined up and am excited to get underway. If you or someone you know has always had a knack for writing or is overly knowledgeable about a particular topic, I’m open to discussing a partnership with the writer – just contact me!

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!

Bring your print materials online

I’m not much of a print guy. I can’t track how many times a person looks at a brochure, nor can I tell what pages interest a person the most. Most importantly, it’s hard to track if a lead came specifically from print collateral or not. I’m not arguing the importance of the various forms of print advertising, but in comparison with the web it can be hard to track the direct benefits a print campaign has.

But, that print material does have a rightful place online. Once it’s online, you get all the tracking benefits that come along with it. Convert that piece of print material into a PDF and link to it from your website. People love the portability of a PDF, and there are ways to track what pages of the PDF are viewed, or if the PDF is printed, etc. You can link back to specific parts of your website from within the PDF, and the best part, you can actually prompt the person viewing the PDF with a form, asking for contact information in order to follow up with the lead. So you can delete those tear-off sheets as you move online.

So if you have print materials just sitting there, get them online! Track their performance and generate some leads. And beyond those benefits, search engines are getting better at indexing PDF content, so bringing that PDF online might actually end up pulling more traffic to your website!

$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.