A few days ago marked the 1 year anniversary of my time as an Internet Marketer/SEO. During this year a lot has happened and most of it for the better. After reading various internet marketing forums, I took really the only required step to making money online: taking action. Since that point, I was able to fully quit my job (although I do remain a full time college student) which gave me complete freedom over my time. I have launched many sites, some successful, many not so much. For the most part, I have always kept what I do a secret and behind closed doors, but that has changed.
My inspiration to finally do a case study on ranking a site came from http://www.cloudlivingjourney.com/ where a fellow internet marketer was able to build out a site that was complete with SEO and then flip it on Flippa for 5 figures further down the line. Tung, if you are reading this, congratulations!
Without further adieu, let’s get into it!
The Niche: Health Related
While I will not being giving away the exact niche for the website I am building out or the exact keywords I can tell you that it is in a health related field. I picked this field because I have a friend who recently released a health product on ClickBank and was looking for affiliates. I have run a great many affiliate sites but never used ClickBank so I thought I would give it a try.
If you have not read my tutorial on keyword research, you can find it here. It needs a bit of updating since Google has since gone to the keyword planner, but for now, reading that article should give you a bit of an understanding of what is going on.
Keyword Research
The provider of this new health project gave me a few keywords that he thought would be profitable. I then ran them through the new Google Planner as well as SEMrush to check how many searches they get a month and pick out more related longtails. The following is what I came up with.
Exact Searches a Month
- 60,500
- 18,100
- 14,800
- 5,400
- 4,400
- 4,400
- 3,600
- 1,900
- 1,600
- 1,600
- 1,600
- 1,300
- 880
- 720
- 590
- 590
- 480
- 260
- 260
- 50
Each one of the bullet points stands for a new keyword and its exact searches a month in Google. The grand total for all 20 keywords in the list comes to 123,060 searches a month!
Obviously I will not be ranking number 1 for all of these terms, but the top 3 biggest searched terms are also “buyers” keywords. They visitors will have an issue and are looking for a product to fix that issue. Simply put, these terms should do well in converting. I have been told by the product provider that his landing page is converting at 10%. I hope to convert my traffic with at least a 5% conversion rate.
Site Structure
The site structure of this niche website is going to be very similar to all the other projects that I have done in the past.
The first thing I decided to do was go with a PEMD or partial exact match domain. This simply means that the main keyword is in the title with some other text.
Next there will be the homepage which will target the top 3 keywords I will attempting to rank. On the homepage I have written a 1000 word article about the niche with a few testimonials and put a large call to action above the fold. The call to action is bold and colored and acts to draw the user to click the link to put them on the products landing page before they have read the article. If they do take the time to read the article, I have placed a call to action in the middle as well as at the very end.
Since I am targeting 20 keywords, I hope to pull in lots of longtail keyword traffic as well. The homepage targets the top 3 keywords and then the blog on the website will consist of informative articles that target each of the other key terms that I will attempt to rank.
The SEO Game Plan
After I got done doing my keyword research, I of course needed to check the competition of each of these keywords. Much to my surprise even the biggest trafficked keywords were not very competitive. There are a few news articles and a few affiliate sites on the first page for each of the terms. Neither of those sites are very heavily back linked or have great on page optimization so it should not be very hard to beat them.
At the time of this writing, the site in question has been sitting for a month with a homepage article of 1000 words and about 10 blog posts of 500 words each.
If none of my readers has ever heard of Matthew Woodward, I highly suggest you go check out his blog. His tutorials on tiered link building are going to be the bread and butter of my tier 1 links (the links that are going to be pointed at the money site.
Along with these type of link building efforts, I will be purchasing a few packages of different type of links from the better known internet marketing forums to get max diversification of links.
Finally, I will add in some private blog network posts to give the best keywords, or keywords that are being difficult, a good boost to the top. Private blog networks are a great way to rank fast but they are not always the safest. If you are looking for a more “white hat” solution, check out my guest posting guide.
The Future
So what does the future hold? I really do not know. The plan is to take this site from zero to hero.
I want to eventually bring this site to earning at least $10,000 a month.
Follow me on any of the social media accounts or subscribe to my newsletter to get updates on the progress of this health site below.
I hope this inspires you to start your own journey or site. Remember, the only thing that is stopping you from gaining success is not taking action!
If you have any questions or comments, please post below. I would love to answer you all while taking questions/suggestions.
This is some great detail you’ve provided in this post. I appreciate you sharing your work with us and providing some good food for thought!
Thanks for sharing my tutorial 🙂
Any time =)
Awesome read. I am also looking at the potential of internet marketing and I am really happy I came across your blog. Thanks for your honesty.
Looking at the health niche I see that most of the top spots are taken by authority sites like webmd etc. I am curious to find out how are you going to work around that?
I am also thinking whether it is worth it to spend all your time and energy on health niches against these giants.
I wrote this a long time ago and the health niche website I created I actually managed to take the first place and beat webMD! This usually will not happen so if you are interested in doing a health niche site, I would focus much of your time before you even get started doing excellent keyword research. This way you can find keywords that are not taken over by the big players and you yourself will be able to compete. However, that is not to say you cannot write on subjects where webMD and others dominate. You want a well rounded site that helps out visitors so all information is useful.
Nice strategy to rank niche website, I recently started a niche blog but I was little afraid to choose EMD for my niche blog so I opted the same as you did NEMD but one thing I am confused about whether to make the home page traditional like latest posts or with homepage with dedicated article targeting the keyword like you did please suggest
You can do either. I like to have a home page that is static and full of one large article but you are free to do whichever you think works best for your niche.
Currently I’m also create some niche sites to get passive income, and I like your case study, I’m still a little in doubt concerning the use of keywords in 2016 and exact, if it still has some weight in the ranking.
Hello Mario, take a look at this article I wrote: http://www.passive.marketing/how-to-start-a-nicheauthority-site-from-scratch/. This should give you a good idea of how keywords are working now days.