The difference 1 keyword makes..

Long post sorry!

So some of you here have had the pleasure of talking with me via PM or Skype. I've helped people where I can and always lend a friendly ear and offer advice where possible. I consider myself to be a "lucky" person I do OK in life.

Not as great as other people, but better than your average Joe. I'm just happy.

The back story

Those that don't know I've had business issues in the past so with my latest venture I've been working on establishing a brand with the SOLE purpose the brand to NOT be for me. It's something I've been building to hand over for my kids and with that as the sole focus things have been going well.

I set up the brand as an experiment there's more to it but I don't need to go into that for the sake of this thread.

The ramble

So I started off the company just over 5 years ago with the aim of it to be a testing ground and it works it works. My first year online I took just a couple of hundred pounds - I tried ads and failed (but learnt a lot) and decided my focus would be on 'not rushing' and go slow organically.

I always get pulled in all directions I go hard for 3months and then I get distracted - I'm sure many can agree BUT the focus has always been there.

My second year I split the business into 4 key business sections (moving into no.5 and 6 this year) all 3 sectors are profitable to the point I no longer need to run my design company I finally closed that in my 4th year. One part of the business sustains the online side of things..

I've always tried different things and we all have that golden keyword we aim for and that was my goal.

I don't consider myself to be a thick person I'm old school seo / design I've been around since 98 as far as I'm concerned little has changed if you do the basics right.

I started to outreach browsed here and tried everything to reach my goal of getting to that page 1 slot of a keyword.

It wasn't until my 3rd year I decided to change my direction a little. ALL online efforts would be to rank no.1 for exact match for my products with the goal being focused on getting traffic to these products and hopefully google would see they are popular and then this would help me drive up the rankings of other pages.

I should note that despite being slow business since year one has grown 3x every year for online sales only.

My 4th year in and I start to get a little depressed with the site - I can't shift my site to rank for any key, keywords, I redesign the site I have a friendly no sales chat with @splishsplash about his PBN network and as I said before he basically told me to go and sort out my site with a SILO.

I done that and saw some slow improvements BUT I also started to write to bloggers asking for product reviews, social media shout outs, anything to get the brand out. Things improved but nothing was getting me to that sweet spot - I avoided buying packages on here because it was a site I wanted to keep not burn or have to repair a few months alter.

Then I discovered a keyword that got me competing with the likes of a well known drinks brand who tried hard to move me from the top spot for a long tail keyword this one phrase saw some dynamic changes in how my site was shared and viewed and slowly got me some traction.

It wasn't until half way through my 4th year that I decided to work on featured snippets and I became good at working out what info google wanted I started to rank for these - now maybe luck was on my side here as towards the start of my 5th year and end of last year - google changed how these feature AND well my exact match and all related searches for 80% of them I sit at no.1 featured spot.

This has helped with brand exposure and I started to get magazines, charities and other events contact me it was a start BUT I still wanted that golden keyword. Id failed to reach it.. and yet I was still hungry for it.

During the past few months since the feature spot changes our online sales have been growing with daily sales everything has been great. (year on year its still be x3 growth)

I'm all about the slow process, learning as I go putting things in place and that's how I like to operate.

NOW something has changed recently the last few days I've landed a page 1 po3 for a "version" of my golden keyword all of a sudden we are hitting 5-10 orders every 30min over the weekend we took a profit of over £4300 THATS after all costs, products, packaging everything.

I know it's not alot by some peoples standard but the cost for producing my product is off set by the other business, my packaging cost less than 0.0012 each and my sales price is low and at an industry affordable price.

That's more money than my first two years running a store.

Orders are still climbing and now I'm naturally getting social media shout outs and mentions which is driving more traffic and sales! The volume from 1 keyword is shocking how things can change.

The point - aim for something and keep going for it, 1 keyword can make all the difference.

All because I hit ONE keyword. All of the long tail stuff was making money and was a nice little business. But one search term has transformed this into something that can now sustain it's self and hopefully grow to become something bigger & better!

None of this has happened over night it's take a long hard slog to get here, taking it slow and to be honest how crazy it's gotten I'm not sure I'm ready for it. I've been here before and things have gone wrong but the drive inside me to get this done should have my kids set up and I have slowly started to create a house hold brand name (cry)

I have 3-4 days (our staff are off self isolating so it's just me) of 20hr shifts just to get onto of orders (we manufacture, pack and ship all of our own products - please dont ask the niche some of you are lucky to know what site is mine and I wish that stays between us!)

I'm not writing this as a blag or a boast - I'm not sure really I just have a small down time between email and packing and just thought id share. IF you aim and work for it and strive to hit it, you could just be one keyword away from changing everything.

This one part of the "larger" business has always been the weaker side but I believed in it. Our other 3 enterprises all pay the bills, have staff - because its been off line and easier to grow compared to competing in the online world!

To all those who write and ask about making money, things are possible it just takes time and effort sure there have been times I wanted to give in and pack it all in. I think most would have ditched after the first year but I wanted to see it through.

Sometimes it only takes a bit of time and dedication. Good luck to you all

Bookmarked!

amazing post, thanks for sharing, I enjoyed every second of reading

Fair play to you for having the patience to keep building slowly. and for sticking with it.
The temptation is too start blasting backlinks at your site

From experience, I know how hard it is. A few years ago I was doing 10k a week. after expenses in position 6
I should have been happy and kept building slowly
anyway you can guess what happened

Congratulations and I 'm sure with your attitude more golden keywords will soon be ranking

Glad to see you're banking! Now that you have some $$ try to diversify your traffic before it vanishes. Remember easy come easy go.

nanavlad said:

Fair play to you for having the patience to keep building slowly. and for sticking with it.
The temptation is too start blasting backlinks at your site

From experience, I know how hard it is. A few years ago I was doing 10k a week. after expenses in position 6
I should have been happy and kept building slowly
anyway you can guess what happened

Congratulations and I 'm sure with your attitude more golden keywords will soon be ranking

Click to expand...

Yeah I been there I built up and lost a multi million pound business when I was much younger and when I did lose it I done everything I could to try and duplicate it just to get the money back from spamming links / manipulating google (as you could then to an extent) and doing things you may consider to be fraud... THAT said.

This time around was all about going slow try to finally learn from past mistakes, mistakes I learn't along the way during the growth of this business I tried to improve on them for next time I've learnt a fair bit about dealing with customers I've even managed to build up a template system of 50-60 generic replies that can be sent out to customers based on the issue / email they sent.

I been trying to do it that way so I can learn and improve on things I was just shit or too young to care about so when I can hire some remote CS staff they have pre made replies and examples ahead of time. At least that's the plan I'll let you know if works the way I intend!

Great read

rafark said:

Glad to see you're banking! Now that you have some $$ try to diversify your traffic before it vanishes. Remember easy come easy go.

Click to expand...

Aye! We diversify a fair bit before the surge in online most sales came from off line marketing. We are multi channel, organic was the last hurdle for us

This year I'm investing nearly 30k into a new product line to launch on Amazon during the summer months ready for Christmas!

that's awesome man, thanks for sharing!

really happy for you, keep crushing it!!

That's awesome, congratulations!

This is so true. Keyword research is everything.

So thought id update with whats going on... Still sitting at no.1 (also seen gains else where)

That one keyword is near 1500 a day in profit. It's crazy.

The biggest thing I'm dealing with is the boom.

So I've always been about learning and trying to figure out where to go and put things in practise along the way. So the processes I had in place to deal with 30-50 orders a day no longer work for 300+ orders a day! Id have expected from growth along the way to increase order size and then introduce new procedures and methods to deal with the new workload and volume.

However it's not been the case I spent the first week trying to keep doing things the old way. Processing orders manually, adding to shipping, picking and packing. I found it a little difficult of adapting new methods to processing and dispatching orders more so when your under pressure to get stock out.

That said I have found new ways of working which has allowed me to process 3x as many orders a day - I've spent out on getting some shipping automation done which once completed should see me be able to do twice as many orders a day again. All of this while being two members of staff down due to COVID-19..

So once and IF those staff return I hope to have a system in place that will let me process 600-800 orders a day enough for some further growth - anything onto of that will require more man power or machine..

A bit of a ramble but my biggest take away for anyone who maybe like me and likes to build and research new processes along the way have a little bit of forward vision - don't assume the same pace will continue and you will grow steadily and can find and implement new things then. I've literary had to plan, adapt, change and introduce new procedures at a time when all of this should have been thought out before hand! - I just didn't expect such a big jump or growth in what feels like 24hrs..

Dealing with customers.

Over the past 5 years or so I've built up a good supply of general replies to fit different cases with the plan to introduce remote working staff to deal with the service side of it, questions, order updates, product information etc. I like to think I've built a nice document with plenty of information for someone to copy and paste from depending on what is going on with the customer. This has now obviously expanded.

However again when you deal with 30-50 orders a day having automated emails on order such as "Purchased or Pre Order", "Packing / Picking", "Shipped" and "Delivered with Review Email"

I get bombarded with emails that I thought where common sense and of course did make sense when dealing with smaller orders.

With more customers I've found that you can't send them too many order update emails! I've now added a few additional automated emails in the steps which has removed Customer Service pressure.

Writing long posts of information I thought was a great way to be informative BUT customers won't read it. So before any long (400+ word) info page I've started to add a key feature or bullet point list with links or anchor links to expand on that info. < This one big change has reduced repetitive emails no end!

So:

- Plan for dealing with a surge in orders & traffic
- Introduce new automated emails
- Make large or informative information easier to digest

Still learning, still coping ... just

Lol, a 5 year old business comes to fruition basically.

Panther28 said:

Lol, a 5 year old business comes to fruition basically.

Click to expand...

Well I have other aspects to the business that do 6 figures a year.

This is the online side of it that's just been taking it's time, tweaking, learning and adjusting to get it ranking. No ad spend or anything like that just sat and let it grow and build on it's own. The business isn't for me it's my hope to get something establish and working I can pass over to my kids if they want it or cash out and give them both a nice lump of cash to set them up to do whatever they want..

& thats why SEO always triumphs SEM or paid

Good one bookmarked

So yesterday I landed on page 1 of google for my "golden keyword" taken ages but am so happy! I know it can go just as quick but I landed there at po8/9 desktop and pos7/8 mobile!

Shame I've got the site orders suspended while I catch up but I hope to be back to normal May 11th so will see what kind of difference this makes! Already looking now at expanding to a unit closer to the current operation or buying in shipping containers and putting them all together as a larger onsite work space at least I can get some help in with while the 2meter social distancing is in force & the work safety stuff..

I've not done anything different just continued with the long tail strategy more than anything taken some time but nice to see it all paying off

Thank you for your write up. As a newbie just starting in IM, this is a big motivation boost.

This was a great share, mate. I read it all.

I love your outlook on things. Like you said, we all might just be 1 keyword away from something major happening.

Major props. Since you're now ranking on page 1, position 3 for a variation of your golden keyword I bet Google will take note of that and maybe even start experimenting with having your site rank on the first page for the actual golden keyword as well.

This might just be the start of something really big happening. I'm rooting for you! Go hard

Sweely said:

This was a great share, mate. I read it all.

I love your outlook on things. Like you said, we all might just be 1 keyword away from something major happening.

Major props. Since you're now ranking on page 1, position 3 for a variation of your golden keyword I bet Google will take note of that and maybe even start experimenting with having your site rank on the first page for the actual golden keyword as well.

This might just be the start of something really big happening. I'm rooting for you! Go hard

Click to expand...

Think you missed the last post I am now on page 1 for my golden keyword

t2van said:

Think you missed the last post I am now on page 1 for my golden keyword

Click to expand...

Yeah, just noticed! Seems like my prediction came true earlier than I had thought

So, what's the next goal? I think it's time to find another golden keyword once you're able to sort out the logistics side of things.