Techxan
Elite Member
- Dec 7, 2011
- 3,092
- 3,619
Back in the beginning of my days on the web I wanted to move along from building hobby sites and I decided to build a money site. I did the keyword research and found a good traffic term, "natural flea remedies", lots of search volume and competition never scares me because you never know how things will shake out. Besides, if you never try you never learn, so I jumped in. I figured I was on the right track, lots of search volume and an urgent problem that needed to be solved now. Money in the bank, huh?
I got an exact match domain with hyphens (no problem with ranking BTW) and set out to dominate this niche and make a ton of money. I put up about 8 pages of content about the flea life cycle, how to get rid of fleas in your carpet, upholstery, yard, natural remedies that are supposed to work, Hoe to give a flea bath, how to get rid of bedbugs, etc.
I decided I would run adsense on the site, and sell natural pet related products. I joined shareasale,com and found pet product affiliates, found an ad rotator to test ads with, and started watching everything to see the money roll in.
In a short while I was the number one result for natural flea remedies, and most of its permutations, and some of the internal pages were hitting their keywords. The site had decent traffic, the on-page had the keywords ranking and I was making nothing. It didn't make sense to me.
I added content to the site occasionally, and moved on, just letting it sit there; it hardly ever made any adsense money and sold no products. Then I caught my snap.
My typical visitor simply doesn't click on ads or buy products, they make their own.
It finally occurred to me that I had made two fundamental mistakes with the site that I was originally unaware of.
First, I had not chosen niche that was not evergreen. If someone came to my site to solve their urgent flea problem, success or fail, they no longer needed to visit my site.
Second, I had decided on keywords without thinking of what the searcher's intent was when they made the search. Looking back at this, clearly "natural flea remedies " is an informational search query, not an action one.
Remember this in your keyword research, the more words in the search query, the more likely there will be a sale. (This translates in the IM world to "Target the long tails")
Example:
"carpet cleaning" is an informational keyword, they might want anything
"Boston carpet cleaning" is more of an action keyword, and it is highly unlikely that someone is searching for general carpet cleaning advice with a city modifier. This searcher is much more likely to spend money than the searcher above.
"24 hour Boston carpet cleaning" is an even better action keyword, as urgency has entered the search query. While the number of people who search for it will be significantly lower, the chances of converting them to a customer are significantly higher. In fact, at this point they are most likely looking for somewhere to spend their money because they have an important problem that needs to be fixed right now.
When you do your keyword research, remember these two mistakes I made as a newbie, it will make your learning curve shorter and your success easier.
I got an exact match domain with hyphens (no problem with ranking BTW) and set out to dominate this niche and make a ton of money. I put up about 8 pages of content about the flea life cycle, how to get rid of fleas in your carpet, upholstery, yard, natural remedies that are supposed to work, Hoe to give a flea bath, how to get rid of bedbugs, etc.
I decided I would run adsense on the site, and sell natural pet related products. I joined shareasale,com and found pet product affiliates, found an ad rotator to test ads with, and started watching everything to see the money roll in.
In a short while I was the number one result for natural flea remedies, and most of its permutations, and some of the internal pages were hitting their keywords. The site had decent traffic, the on-page had the keywords ranking and I was making nothing. It didn't make sense to me.
I added content to the site occasionally, and moved on, just letting it sit there; it hardly ever made any adsense money and sold no products. Then I caught my snap.
My typical visitor simply doesn't click on ads or buy products, they make their own.
It finally occurred to me that I had made two fundamental mistakes with the site that I was originally unaware of.
First, I had not chosen niche that was not evergreen. If someone came to my site to solve their urgent flea problem, success or fail, they no longer needed to visit my site.
Second, I had decided on keywords without thinking of what the searcher's intent was when they made the search. Looking back at this, clearly "natural flea remedies " is an informational search query, not an action one.
Remember this in your keyword research, the more words in the search query, the more likely there will be a sale. (This translates in the IM world to "Target the long tails")
Example:
"carpet cleaning" is an informational keyword, they might want anything
"Boston carpet cleaning" is more of an action keyword, and it is highly unlikely that someone is searching for general carpet cleaning advice with a city modifier. This searcher is much more likely to spend money than the searcher above.
"24 hour Boston carpet cleaning" is an even better action keyword, as urgency has entered the search query. While the number of people who search for it will be significantly lower, the chances of converting them to a customer are significantly higher. In fact, at this point they are most likely looking for somewhere to spend their money because they have an important problem that needs to be fixed right now.
When you do your keyword research, remember these two mistakes I made as a newbie, it will make your learning curve shorter and your success easier.
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