Blog

Most SEO’s (I’m talking about legit ones, not the ones in India that works for $5/hr, spamming the Web all day), will tell you that there is no quick and easy way to do SEO. It takes patience. The truth is, even though there may be no “tricks and secrets” to boost your ranking overnight, there are some low hanging fruits. By following these simple steps, you may just find yourself with some additional revenue before you know it.

Planning

Although these are quick and easy tactics to give you a head start on SEO, it will require a bit of investment in time and money, so it’s important to do your due diligence to see if it even make sense for you to make a commitment.

First thing you will need to do is a quick keyword research to see how many people are searching for that keyword. This number is called “search volume”. To check the search volume of a site, you can use various tools. The most popular one is the Keyword Tool for Google Adwords, but I like to use Wordtracker. Google’s Keyword Tool also shows search volume within their content network, so it’s usually significantly higher. I use Google to get the keyword suggestions, but mostly I rely on Wordtracker for the actual search volume.

Make a list of possible keywords you might want to target and their search volumes. For larger scale sites, it’s important to create a taxonomy of keywords and develop a sitemap around it, but for the purpose of this article, making a list of few keywords will suffice.

Demand

The most obvious reason for doing the keyword research is to see if there is even a demand. Gather the monthly search volume of the keywords you wish to target.

Ranking on top fold (usually top 3) on Google will give you an average of 20% click-through rate. The average conversion rate (customers making a purchase or contacting you) on Google is 2%. This means, on average, 0.4% of the search volume may end up becoming your customer. If the keywords you want to target has a combined monthly search volume of 10,000, you may end up with 40 customers. (Of course this is just my fuzzy math in order to explain the concept)

Now, using this math, . If your keyword was “ipod case” and your margin is $1 per sale, it might not be worth the investment for $40/month. However, if your keyword is “rolex watch” and you have a margin of $1,000 per sale, it’s definitely worth the investment at $40,000/month.

Competitive Keywords

After doing your keyword research, if you’re telling your self “this is too good to be true.” It probably is. Some industries/keywords may have a ton of search volume (e.g. “ipad 2″), but that doesn’t mean the 0.4% rule still applies. Remember, this is only if you were to rank in the top 3 of the search results.

In order to see how steep the competition is for a keyword, just type the keyword in Google and browse some of the sites on the first page. Take a look at their PageRank. If the PageRank of the top sites on average are higher than 4 or 5, it may be too competitive, especially if your site is still new.

Make a list of keywords that is not too competitive, yet is profitable enough. You may have to keep tweaking the list, or hire a professional SEO company. In some cases, there may not be enough demand at all. Remember, SEO may not be right for every business.