janer2019
Junior Member
- Oct 1, 2019
- 109
- 156
Case study of How I found a keyword that was essentially a typo error with massive volume. Built over a fresh domain name that only had numbers in it. 
We recently sold the same website via FE-International. Attached is the screenshot of escrow sold transaction summary. Let’s dig in now:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Start
There’s no niche that’s left hidden under the rock or has not been attempted by Internet marketeers & SEOs. If you are just beginning out, it’s important to assume the competition will always be there and so dive in with a belief to put your best foot forward.
Being a copywriter, I always wanted to create an asset that could earn me some extra cash but lacked advance SEO tactics. For leverage, I teamed up with my then office colleague and decided to build an asset and replicate what founders of my company were doing. Our founders had multiple assets that maintained them a cash flow using Ads & Affiliate marketing and we just wanted one of ours.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Was Our Niche?
Our niche was quite exotic and had moderate competition back then. Our main motive was to rank for just one keyword that had a huge volume, get traffic and then monetise it with ad programs like Mediavine,Ezoic or Adthrive.
Our Niche idea was based around a device that's indirectly an essential part of anyone who uses an internet enabled device. Turns out the number of people Googling the wrong query were 10x more than the ones who were doing it right. Can't reveal much
The Correct KW Volume: 23k
The Wrong(Mis-typed) KW Volume: 139k
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Site & Our Strategy
We wanted to go ahead with an EMD (Exact Match Domain) and hence bought the domain name with a .org as .com and others were already taken.
To begin with, On content front we attempted all the LSIs and followed a SILO structure(Siloing is the act of dividing a website’s content into different categories and subcategories — groupings known as silos. Sorting and linking related pages means a website will carry more clout in search engine rankings, and index your web content ) throughout the website.
This allowed us to have a uniformity across the content and helped in smooth interlinking. Initially to make Google aware of our niche, it was important to attempt the keywords that had volume as less as 20–30, all of it was because there’s less competition for such keywords and you can rank easily for them.
Once we saw a momentum shift in Organic Keywords, One can easily scale the Heavy keywords with Links and Content. Also what helped was that we were able to find a lot of not so explored keywords using KGR method by Doug.
Here’s the screenshot of our website’s latest Ahref’s metrics
We knew if we could rank our asset for one heavy-weight keyword, we could easily carry forward the same momentum to other such keywords so for example. If our site was based around Men’s Grooming, we would write informational articles about Men’s grooming and slowly move towards to Best Philips Trimmer, Best Beard Cream etc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clustering
After 6–7 months, we were stuck on 3rd position in SERPs and did everything we could to outrank the 1st result but it won’t go. Someone suggested us to do clustering, You can confuse clustering with LSIs and SILO but what we were doing is simply trying to write more and more articles around the main keyword and intern-link them.
We attempted all the keywords that made sense despite having 0 or 10 volume. After about 8 months, we won the 1st position and it’s been 9 months since January this year, we still have the 1st position.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Expenditure
Experiment that accidentally gave us an advantage
Ours was an EMD(exact match domain), despite Google’s update, EMDs still work and work very well. We had a lot many EMDs on 1st Page. We wanted to create a Google Chrome extension and see if it gives preference to its own services and products. Turns out it did despite relevancy. We paid Google 5$ and without any coding were easily able to create multiple google chrome extensions.
Within just 2 weeks, the extension we created started to rank on the 1st page where our website was also ranking. We were also afraid if it would outrank us! and eventually it did but not for the main keyword but some other keyword that we attempted.
So unknowingly we were now competing with just 8 competitors compared to 9.
Another thing we noticed was that Google was also rewarding Video results and thus we created our own video and left it to age. It was just recently that it came on the 10th position making us compete only with 8 competitors now.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Link Building Strategy
Our Link building strategy was clear: No PBNs and not much paid links(simply because we didn’t have a budget). We wanted to get as many free links as possible which means we attempted all the relevant forums and the generous few bloggers who still accept free guest posts.
Above image shows a few of our Do-follow links. We may have bought almost 5–6 paid guest posts but whenever we did, it was solely on the basis of that blog being somewhat relevant to our topic an also it should have some monthly traffic(preferably above 1000). Our do-follow-nofollow ratio was 60–40.
We did a good mixture of the anchor text variations and focused on diversified links. We did have a social media page but it was not of any use since ours was an informational blog that was solving a pain point of the user that required immediate solution.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Google Update Hit
We were not HIT by a single Google Update. Although these days, even if you follow Google’s rule book. One can’t promise you that you won’t be hit by the update but we were quite lucky to have not hit by the update even once in the whole life of our asset. Although if you see in the image below, you will notice a slight bump in the organic search traffic.
This bump was because all of a sudden, we had a featured snippet ranking for our main keyword which took away 40% of the traffic. The worse part was the snippet was not our asset and the content of the snippet wasn’t relevant but who to complain!
We kept working on content and expanded to several other similar keywords. The snippet lasted for just a month and we were back to the 1st position. In the 3–4 updates we saw for our asset, in 2 we saw only hike in the traffic while in one we were not impacted at all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monetisation
To avoid distraction we promised to not run Google Adsense unless we came on the 1st page for the main keyword. Once we came, we ran ads despite knowing they would pay peanuts as our main goal was to qualify for high paying ad-program like Ezoic and Mediavine. For the first few months, the average Adsense monthly payout was only 166$
We applied for Ezoic and that’s when the magic began. We came on 1st position in January and qualified for Ezoic in March,19. In march, we hit our first 1000$ a month.
You can see our EPMV(Average revenue per 1000 visitors) was 30$ which is incredible and that gave us some perspective so our entire focus shifted on how to increase the traffic so that the EPMV improved. Here’s the result
And the Earnings:
The Small bump in May was because of the featured snippet. If you notice the highlighted blue section. It’s the Premium Ad earnings which is an Invite Only program for which we got approved and it helped improve the earnings.
As of now the site is easily making Over 2500$ a month for the new owner. $2000 from Ads and $500 from Amazon Affiliate Program
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion
Here’s the latest screenshot of last 12 month’s Organic Growth for our asset. It’s beautiful to see the growth un-impacted by any update. Before we sold the site, we earned around $8500 over a period of 8–10 months and then flipped the asset for $34,000 which means we earned around $41,000.
What worked for us:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We recently sold the same website via FE-International. Attached is the screenshot of escrow sold transaction summary. Let’s dig in now:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Start
There’s no niche that’s left hidden under the rock or has not been attempted by Internet marketeers & SEOs. If you are just beginning out, it’s important to assume the competition will always be there and so dive in with a belief to put your best foot forward.
Being a copywriter, I always wanted to create an asset that could earn me some extra cash but lacked advance SEO tactics. For leverage, I teamed up with my then office colleague and decided to build an asset and replicate what founders of my company were doing. Our founders had multiple assets that maintained them a cash flow using Ads & Affiliate marketing and we just wanted one of ours.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What Was Our Niche?
Our niche was quite exotic and had moderate competition back then. Our main motive was to rank for just one keyword that had a huge volume, get traffic and then monetise it with ad programs like Mediavine,Ezoic or Adthrive.
Our Niche idea was based around a device that's indirectly an essential part of anyone who uses an internet enabled device. Turns out the number of people Googling the wrong query were 10x more than the ones who were doing it right. Can't reveal much
The Correct KW Volume: 23k
The Wrong(Mis-typed) KW Volume: 139k
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Site & Our Strategy
We wanted to go ahead with an EMD (Exact Match Domain) and hence bought the domain name with a .org as .com and others were already taken.
To begin with, On content front we attempted all the LSIs and followed a SILO structure(Siloing is the act of dividing a website’s content into different categories and subcategories — groupings known as silos. Sorting and linking related pages means a website will carry more clout in search engine rankings, and index your web content ) throughout the website.
This allowed us to have a uniformity across the content and helped in smooth interlinking. Initially to make Google aware of our niche, it was important to attempt the keywords that had volume as less as 20–30, all of it was because there’s less competition for such keywords and you can rank easily for them.
Once we saw a momentum shift in Organic Keywords, One can easily scale the Heavy keywords with Links and Content. Also what helped was that we were able to find a lot of not so explored keywords using KGR method by Doug.
Here’s the screenshot of our website’s latest Ahref’s metrics
We knew if we could rank our asset for one heavy-weight keyword, we could easily carry forward the same momentum to other such keywords so for example. If our site was based around Men’s Grooming, we would write informational articles about Men’s grooming and slowly move towards to Best Philips Trimmer, Best Beard Cream etc.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clustering
After 6–7 months, we were stuck on 3rd position in SERPs and did everything we could to outrank the 1st result but it won’t go. Someone suggested us to do clustering, You can confuse clustering with LSIs and SILO but what we were doing is simply trying to write more and more articles around the main keyword and intern-link them.
We attempted all the keywords that made sense despite having 0 or 10 volume. After about 8 months, we won the 1st position and it’s been 9 months since January this year, we still have the 1st position.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Expenditure
- Total Money Spent on buying Relevant links: 180$
- No PBNs Used
- No Hacklinks or any coloured hat SEO technique used
- Content Written: 80 Unique articles with average length: 800 words
- Traffic Source: 98% Organic from Google, 2% Social
Experiment that accidentally gave us an advantage
Ours was an EMD(exact match domain), despite Google’s update, EMDs still work and work very well. We had a lot many EMDs on 1st Page. We wanted to create a Google Chrome extension and see if it gives preference to its own services and products. Turns out it did despite relevancy. We paid Google 5$ and without any coding were easily able to create multiple google chrome extensions.
Within just 2 weeks, the extension we created started to rank on the 1st page where our website was also ranking. We were also afraid if it would outrank us! and eventually it did but not for the main keyword but some other keyword that we attempted.
So unknowingly we were now competing with just 8 competitors compared to 9.
Another thing we noticed was that Google was also rewarding Video results and thus we created our own video and left it to age. It was just recently that it came on the 10th position making us compete only with 8 competitors now.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Link Building Strategy
Our Link building strategy was clear: No PBNs and not much paid links(simply because we didn’t have a budget). We wanted to get as many free links as possible which means we attempted all the relevant forums and the generous few bloggers who still accept free guest posts.
Above image shows a few of our Do-follow links. We may have bought almost 5–6 paid guest posts but whenever we did, it was solely on the basis of that blog being somewhat relevant to our topic an also it should have some monthly traffic(preferably above 1000). Our do-follow-nofollow ratio was 60–40.
We did a good mixture of the anchor text variations and focused on diversified links. We did have a social media page but it was not of any use since ours was an informational blog that was solving a pain point of the user that required immediate solution.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Google Update Hit
We were not HIT by a single Google Update. Although these days, even if you follow Google’s rule book. One can’t promise you that you won’t be hit by the update but we were quite lucky to have not hit by the update even once in the whole life of our asset. Although if you see in the image below, you will notice a slight bump in the organic search traffic.
This bump was because all of a sudden, we had a featured snippet ranking for our main keyword which took away 40% of the traffic. The worse part was the snippet was not our asset and the content of the snippet wasn’t relevant but who to complain!
We kept working on content and expanded to several other similar keywords. The snippet lasted for just a month and we were back to the 1st position. In the 3–4 updates we saw for our asset, in 2 we saw only hike in the traffic while in one we were not impacted at all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monetisation
To avoid distraction we promised to not run Google Adsense unless we came on the 1st page for the main keyword. Once we came, we ran ads despite knowing they would pay peanuts as our main goal was to qualify for high paying ad-program like Ezoic and Mediavine. For the first few months, the average Adsense monthly payout was only 166$
We applied for Ezoic and that’s when the magic began. We came on 1st position in January and qualified for Ezoic in March,19. In march, we hit our first 1000$ a month.
You can see our EPMV(Average revenue per 1000 visitors) was 30$ which is incredible and that gave us some perspective so our entire focus shifted on how to increase the traffic so that the EPMV improved. Here’s the result
And the Earnings:
The Small bump in May was because of the featured snippet. If you notice the highlighted blue section. It’s the Premium Ad earnings which is an Invite Only program for which we got approved and it helped improve the earnings.
As of now the site is easily making Over 2500$ a month for the new owner. $2000 from Ads and $500 from Amazon Affiliate Program
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion
Here’s the latest screenshot of last 12 month’s Organic Growth for our asset. It’s beautiful to see the growth un-impacted by any update. Before we sold the site, we earned around $8500 over a period of 8–10 months and then flipped the asset for $34,000 which means we earned around $41,000.
What worked for us:
- Being a little creative with keywords
- Starting with Low competitive Keywords
- Understanding the SERPs and understanding what kinds of results Google rewarded
- Not getting distracted by money in the beginning
- Not doing aggressive link building
- Avoiding shortcuts/PBNs etc
- Continuous monthly Site audit
- Constantly pushing high quality content, always better than others
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
