My business was entirely built on SEO
Today, one month after I sold the business, the buyer has already made 5.000 euros from the site because visitors kept coming in.
SEO Sold My Business
SEO was getting the clients - not me.
I left the company, but the 'SEO' is still there to work for the new owner and passively acquire clients on his behalf.
Therefore, this marketing approach was an asset that increased the company's value when I sold it.
In the following, I share my thoughts on SEO.
How Google Makes Money
Google make their money by showing users the best possible search results.
Therefore, the excellent search-optimized website will help Google make money by providing users with what they look for.
The best sites have the top rankings, so your job is to do better if you want a top ranking.
Help Google do their job, and you nailed SEO.
The Good Bad News About Time
Google have a brand to cater for, so they won't allow just anyone to show up on the first page on a valuable search phrase. Therefore you need to earn Google's trust, which takes time and requires your patience!
I believe that you should think 1-2 years ahead to get a return on your efforts, which is good news.
Most companies don't have the patience for this, making SEO a more realistic playing field for anyone willing to invest long-term. I see people writing a single 1.000-word blog post expecting it would generate hundreds of visitors to their site, but it doesn't work like this!
You must have patience and believe that your strategy will work with time.
The Cornerstone Strategy
I used the cornerstone strategy when designing my SEO strategy, and it worked.
The cornerstone strategy is a method to organize your blog posts around your target keywords to enforce these.
Do your keyword analysis and make your content around this cornerstone.
The cornerstone strategy goes hand in hand with creating content that ages well.
The Evergreen Approach to Content
The content I made three years ago is still relevant, and therefore I had little maintenance. This approach saved me time that I could use on making new evergreen content.
When you make evergreen content, it has to add actual value. So give visitors the answers they need on your website and reasons to return to your site.
Suppose you can make something useful for people to link to their website or social media. In that case, your website will gain authority in the eyes of Google.
With authority, you will be able to rank more and more 'quickly' on new topics as time goes by.
You've created a flywheel.
Summary
Here is the quick summary:
- SEO is an asset to your business.
- Do your keyword research
- Use the cornerstone strategy and make evergreen content.
- Check the top 3 ranking websites for the keyword, and make sure you do a better job.
- Do the work and have patience.
Let me know if you have any good tips or questions!?
Out of curiosity what keywords and evergreen content did you use?
Thank you for the question:-) My site was targeted a danish audience, so the keywords were in Danish. The topic was 'GDPR', and GDPR was my main keyword and synonyms here of, and so I built my cornerstones on these. I targeted the high-level keywords and provided "how-to" content for the upper funnel. My business was doing courses, and the target audience for these were non-experts, so all these high-level keywords were a good match for the target audience.
I gave away all the knowledge for free. My theory was that "nobody has the time or the passion for figuring this out anyways", so they will pick the course provider which provides the best content.
I also made content which people would link to e.g. ready made templates, or explanations they could sent to their customers or collegeaues. This created many organic backlinks for the site, which made it easier to rank on new keywords.
That is really clever! How long did it take before you started to see a genuine result in traffic?
How did you initially distribute content before you had good enough inbound to get discovered?
I started getting traction quite early. I benefitted from GDPR being a new top topic, so there was still space for making content that didn't exist already. A year and a half in, I would be peaking at 750 clicks a day from Google.
I also benefitted from being in competition with the legal business, which is super old school in making content.
My theory is that excellent content is hard to make. If you are willing to make an effort, you will always be able to rank. But one also needs to be smart about it - at least by knowing which keywords to target. I see many with good content lacking a plan which hinders their ranking.
I didn't distribute content but focused on making content that people would distribute for me, e.g. by making templates they could copy-paste or "explainer" text they could send to colleagues.
How do you measure which keyword/topic drives the best traffic to your website?
I’ve seen a lot of people talking about using SEMRush or Ahrefs to scope out keywords vs competitors. Probably that vs monitoring bounce rates for search terms? People coming in for the wrong terms will likely bounce quickly.
That's the direction I'm thinking in.
Did you find any reliable way to measure bounce rate by keyword? (without losing the majority of traffic because of keyword = unknown)
Not sure btw about Bounce Rate in the definition of Google Analytics. Especially with JS-based frontends, this value may be very unreliable. We're more looking at Engaged Sessions (= sessions with at least one engagement = any type of tracked interaction).
Good question:-) So, a lot of different tools exist that can help you out with this; Ahrefs, SEMRush, and many more! I have used a slightly cheaper and old school tool called SEO Power Suite. I like it. Not always exact, but provide the information you need. I also use the Google Search Console a lot, which is free.
In terms of doing the keyword analysis to figure out which you keywords to target - that is a small discipline in itself. I think it is important to the analysis well, because it is not always obvious which searches people do! This entail doing a lot of keyword discovery, which most SEO tools help you to do aswell.
My primary keyword was "GDPR". Therefore my primary cornerstone was built on this keyword. I had other "sub-cornerstones" beneath this targeting other keywords.
Did this answer your question? If not I will give it another go;-)
Thanks! I was using Ahrefs and SEMRush in the past for this type of reporting. Currently, I'm using Mangools.
My question was more about the actual investigation of what keyword drives the best traffic. So which keyword is responsible for the most signups/subscriptions/sales.
I have done a lot of content marketing and SEO in the past. But somehow I wasted a lot of time and resources in creating content that doesn't drive the "right" traffic.
Sometimes, you come across keyword ideas that are great to generate more traffic for your website. But they don't necessarily have to contribute a lot to your business performance (revenue).
Do you have any data-driven approach to measuring this effect? Or all just out of your gut?
Ah yeah I understand now.
I don't have a data driven approach, and I completely agree that a lot traffic doesn't impact the business. My approach was to identify what I believed to be high intent keywords and look at the number of searches on these so to target these for ranking. Basically the good and old manual approach of categorizing keywords into different groups. Some of the search phrases were quite obviously high intent, and they were my primary focus.
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i'm also a beginner and working on my first project doing on page and offpage by own you can check it here https://pickleballhop.com/
I am a newbie and doing seo with my site and here it is https://pickleballobby.com/best-pickleball-paddle/
I see what you did there;-)
Thank you so much for sharing such a great step about SEO. With the help of these step I am going to update and improve the SEO of ecom store and specially https://homeypath.com/wicker-outdoor-coffee-tables/ . Will definitely share the improvement after applying these guidance.
Nice! Happy to hear that:-)
Until the day the search engine does not feed you traffic. What will you do with fixed costs?
Good question! I went all-in on SEO as a one-person business because the keyword analysis showed a significant demand, fitting my offer and skillset. I would probably have focused on cold-calling, B2B partnerships, and LinkedIn if SEO had not worked.
I guess all online businesses are at the mercy of the algorithms and have to consider the worst-case scenario that you point out.