As it turns out, I’m not the only SEO professional in the family. At 14, my daughter
Chloe
started creating a passive income stream, enviable to most teenagers,
of up to $1,100 per month. She did it with only a few ingredients: a
WordPress blog, a Google AdSense account and some basic SEO knowledge.
Like many young teenagers at the time (which was about 10 years ago),
she was obsessed with the Nickelodeon-owned “virtual pet” website
Neopets.com. So, like any enterprising young internet entrepreneur, she
started a fan site, at
NeopetsFanatic.com, and monetized it.
She researched profitable keyword niches like game cheats, avatars,
neopoints and so on. Then she developed content around those niches.
After that, she started building buzz and links, leveraging the angle
that here’s a kid doing SEO. It doesn’t take very many bloggers picking
up on that before you get traction in the Google results.
Pretty soon, she was getting enough visitors to make consistent money
with Google AdSense. However, she wouldn’t have seen such great returns
on her time spent (which after the initial site build amounted to a
handful of blog posts
per year) if she hadn’t made the front page for her primary keyword target, “neopets cheats.”
I gave her some training and coaching, but she did all the work. And
she was willing to put herself out there as a public figure — speaking
to the media, speaking on stage at numerous conferences, at 16 years
old. Thanks to the speaking gigs and resulting press coverage, her blog
ranked on the first half of page 1 in Google for “neopets.” Boom!
A decade later, my daughter continues to milk this early success,
even with Neopets being a fad that’s well past its prime. She does SEO
consulting for clients (Yes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree)
and continues to get in the limelight whenever possible. A couple of
weeks ago, she
was a guest on Jeremy Schoemaker’s podcast, the
Shoemoney Show — another opportunity to demonstrate her entrepreneurial prowess.
The moral of the story: if a child can do it, so can you!
Though your mileage may vary, Chloe’s results are replicable with the
right knowledge and the right strategies. Here are five tips to make
SEO child’s play.
1. Look For Bankable Keyword Opportunities
Fueled by her passion for the topic of Neopets, she used a basic
keyword tool (Nowadays there are many great options for these, with much
more sophistication — SEMRush, for instance) to see how she could best
reach people with her same interest in Neopets.
She discovered that “neopets cheats” was hugely popular, showing up
near the top of the Google Suggest autocomplete suggestions list for
“neopets.” She set the bar a little lower because of the competition
level for that keyword, initially going after “neopet cheats” and
getting traction on that keyword pretty quickly.
With that success, she was able to garner attention from bloggers,
and with that additional PageRank, she set her sights higher for
“neopets cheats.” Google Suggest guided her entire site structure, in
fact. All the categories of her blog were based in large part on the
popular Neopets-related keywords.
Any online marketer can do the same, and it needn’t be for a fan site
or standalone blog. Exploring keyword niches related to a passion or
hobby of yours can reveal new opportunities for you to add new sections
or categories to your existing site to reach new audiences that may have
interest in that topic.
In fact, just today I was having a conversation about applying this
very strategy with an artist who has a passion for elephants and
stopping poachers. He committed to moving ahead with this strategy and
will be incorporating an elephants section into his
art website.
Another tip: Track the keywords your site already ranks for. Are
there a few for which you rank 11, 12 or 13? These could be an
incredibly easy opportunity to get on the front page, which is where the
views are, by beefing up the quality and depth of the content focused
around these keywords.
2. See What Content Is Out There, And Figure Out How You Can Improve Upon It
The queries people search for are your insight into their intentions and interests.
Do you find that there are several blogs in your niche, but their
coverage is kind of spotty? Flesh out some ideas that provide needed
depth on the topic and add massive value. Want to become the go-to blog
for winter wilderness survival? Create a comprehensive eBook for edible
plants, bring on survival experts, offer resources on starting a fire in
a snowy landscape and where to buy the best flint — there are so many
ways you could make this niche your own.
Take note especially if searchers are searching for specific items
using your internal site search. Are your visitors using
terminology/vocabulary that you don’t? If you’re using certain words,
but your visitors are using alternative synonyms, you have a disconnect.
Or perhaps they are searching for problems, but you are only chasing
after the solution-related keywords. Better finesse your content.
For example, if folks are searching on the problem of “treating
frostbite,” and your content is about the solutions of “hand warmers”
and “sterile dressing,” then you have some writing to do.
3. Make Sure Your Site Is Palatable To Robots
For visitors to flock to your blog, they need to be able to find it
first. And although the content should first and foremost be written for
the audience, it also needs to be written for the search engines.
Yes, the bots, spiders, crawlers, whatever you want to call them,
cannot be neglected. Here are a few tips to make sure the bots “get”
what you’re offering:
- Keep your navigation simple. Make sure there aren’t any pages that are incredibly difficult to get to from your home page.
- Keep URLs as short as you can. The folder organization within the URL should make sense, too.
- Bots don’t read the text when it is part of an image. Make
sure the text is overlaid on top of the image instead. If that text
isn’t in the HTML source as text, it’s likely not going to count.
- Don’t hide text and require site users to hover over something or click a tab to display the text. If
you do this, you risk Google discounting this text, at least partially.
Whether it’s product specs or customer reviews, display that great
search engine fodder by default.
- Check that your pages are being crawled often. If
there is a strange lag, or if the crawling stops, this is a strong
indicator something is awry and Google is having trouble accessing your
content.
4. Focus On Getting Links Rather Than Likes
Although social signals are nice to have, links are where it’s at. To
acquire links, your content must be linkworthy, as in high-quality,
engaging and remarkable. That’s a given. You also need to find a good
home for that content. Here are a few tips on how to do that:
- Keep it on your domain. Although microsites can make sense
for certain brand awareness campaigns or events, aim to build up the
link authority of your primary site by hosting the linkworthy content
there.
- Be brandable. A linkworthy domain is memorable, easy to type
and not confusing when spoken aloud. If it is a clumsy, awkward or
otherwise horrible domain, consider changing it. You can buy aftermarket
domains for as little as a few hundred dollars. I bought ScienceOfSEO.com for $500, for instance. You can start your search for aftermarket domains at BuyDomains.com and HugeDomains.com;
enter your keywords into their site search and start shopping. Examples
of brand and domain “makeovers”: Alpha & Omega Financial Services
(AOFSUSA.com) became Living Wealth (LivingWealth.com), American Response Inc. (ARI2000.com) became SkyCover (SkyCover.com), and iFitnessMind (iFitnessMind.com) became Orion’s Method (OrionsMethod.com). The first two were the fruits of my re-branding efforts; the latter was my fiancee’s.
- Tone down the sales pitch. The launching pad of your
linkworthy content will most likely be your blog. Your blog should never
be a shill for your company — full of shameless plugs, photos of your
booth at trade shows and ads for your products/services filling the
sidebar. Your blog should be at an arm’s length from your online store
or corporate site in terms of its look and feel. If your viral article
would repel a Reddit user because of the commercial feel to the page,
you’re doing it wrong. Companies who “get it” include Valore Books with their blog, and REI with their blog. You can’t go wrong with a magazine-type feel, in my opinion.
5. Build Your Credibility Over Time With Authority Marketing
Building authority goes beyond links. The links and the content are
great building blocks, but don’t stop there. Aim to become a thought
leader in your field.
Conferences related to your niche are a great way to get your
presence known among the other niche experts and influencers. If you can
market yourself effectively enough to get a speaking gig, that will
give you a huge boost in your visibility as an expert. There are plenty
of Calls for Speakers posted on the web by industry conferences. Start
applying. My daughter at 16 could do it; so can you.
If you don’t have any significant speaking experience, and you’re
starting from zero, it’ll be easier to break into the speaking world if
you first go local. Meetups (meetup.com) are still going strong, and
they present a great opportunity to do some local-scale networking. Once
you have a feel for the group, propose a topic that you have enough
knowledge on to present yourself.
After meeting other experts or sharing your content with them, talk
about how you can collaborate with each other on podcasts, collaborative
articles, Google Hangout webinars and other projects. This could lead
to their subscriber base getting interested in what you have to offer,
as well.
Consider launching your own podcast show. Being a podcast host not
only conveys thought leadership status, it also gives you a great excuse
to reach out to major influencers and start a dialogue because you can
invite them onto your show as a guest. Be sure to ask your fans,
followers and listeners to post reviews on iTunes, as that’s an
important part of the iTunes ranking algorithm.
Final Thoughts
By finding a valuable niche, building
your content and credibility, and then using SEO to get that content
seen, you can easily make money in a way that can scale. It’s child’s
play! Well not really, it’s a lot of hard work. But if you are willing
to put in the “hard yards,” even if you’re not technical, you can
achieve great results and dominate in Google.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be
those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff
authors are listed here.
