Rank your websites using smarter link building methods

Something some people don’t realize about their websites is that their market research and their keyword research were wrong from the get-go, and that they might be going after the wrong keywords with their sites.

Sometimes a web”master” will go after hard to rank for generic keywords versus low competition, highly profitable money keywords and search terms, and that’s the gist of this article…

So let’s say you picked a niche, you think you know your keywords,their organic search volume, the main and sub keywords, their CPC, EPC, and after all that data is in your hands, you’ve decided you want to rank for the highest traffic generating, highest search volume terms…

…but do you really want to rank for the highest volume keywords?

Maybe yes, maybe not…

Sometimes high volume equals generic traffic when compared to buying keywords search volume.  Generic traffic tends to convert at a lower percentage than the money terms so there’s a toss up here, do you want delayed gratification and wait months to rank a generic high comp. term or go after the low hanging fruit and rank within weeks for better converting terms?

Smarter link building starts with smarter keyword research (I can hear the yawns now).

A simple “trick” to establishing good ROI with site building and link building is to know what your profitable keywords are…

• what are the real buying keywords?
• what are the “solve this problem for me” long tail phrases?
• what’s getting high CPC or EPC or whatever?
• what can I rank for sooner rather than later?

Short version-  Send PPC traffic to a website of yours selling something directly and see which keywords convert the best.  You will get accurate search volume numbers and will be able to assess whether this volume is going to provide an acceptable income for your business/websites.

Long version-(somewhat simplified)

Step 1- You have a niche picked out, and a list of keywords (high volume low volume, related, long tail, short tail etc…)

Step 2- Set up landing pages for each keyword, or even dedicated websites

Step 3- Set up PPC campaigns for these keywords to ascertain which type-in searches convert best (you see this on your analytics stats or just in bottom line sales, or clicks, or even newsletter opt-ins).

THEN… once you know what your profitable keywords are, then assess the competition…. which of these are rank-achievable and when

….Then what?

Buy domains for these keywords, set up EMD’s based on these terms

or just optimize, or re-optimize, then rank your websites for these terms if achievable sooner rather than later.

Once this ROI pans out for you, then you can invest more energies into the more generic terms with higher volume traffic…

MORE…

Even if you set up a PPC ad that doesn’t encourage clicks because you’re not a good PPC ad writer, you will still get an accurate representation of the search volume for these keywords, because the number of ad impressions does in fact equal the number of searches…

So even if you’re not into testing conversions and don’t want to write ads, you can still use PPC campaigns to accurately gauge the search volume.

However, I’m not encouraging you to set up paid campaigns just to see what the true search volume is.  If you’re going to go to the effort of writing ads and paying for potential clicks, you might as well focus on your back-end (conversions) as well…  you’ll be better off if you don’t half-a** this and just follow the method all the way through.

I don’t teach keyword research and market research here and don’t intend to….

However, smarter link building does start at the very beginning, with good research, and it’s easily done