The reason I’m posting this is because I’m tired of explaining this to people in my every day life that come to me with similar stories. From this point on, I can just link them to this article.

Okay, for those of you that make a living selling SEO services to businesses, I apologize. If it’s any consolation, the odds of you pitching a business owner who has read this blog post will be slim to none!

Recently, I was chatting with a middle-aged DUI attorney in a hot tub up in Mammoth. As we all know, hot tubs are where all the most important networking happens. Naturally, we got to talking about our respective lines of work. As it turned out, he was about as interested in the world of SEO as I was in the details of how to get out of a DUI. An enthusiastic, drunken conversation followed.

Real quick, for those of you wondering, his advice to anyone that gets pulled over while intoxicated is to refuse the breathalyzer, refuse the field sobriety test, and let them take you to the station and blood test you. This may be common knowledge to some of you, but it was golden info to me! Basically following that procedure makes it infinitely easier for your attorney to get you out of the dang thing. Not that I think any of you are irresponsible enough to drink and drive…I digress.

He Spends a Shitload on SEO with Minimal Results

Like many other business owners, he figured this was just the nature of the SEO beast. I’m sure his SEO company reinforced this notion whenever he voiced any concern.

So, here is what I told Bob:

Bob, if your SEO company has the skill set to rank you or anyone for competitive attorney-related keywords, then why are they spending so much time and energy looking for people like you willing to pay them to do it, even though they can’t guarantee results? Fundamentally, doesn’t make much sense. If you can efficiently rank semi-competitive terms on the Googlez, you can make more money than the monthly fee you would charge an attorney.

Bob’s response: ahhhhhhh.

To be fair, there is a lot of money to be made in selling SEO services. After all, it is a seller’s market. It is also very scalable. But that doesn’t mean it is going to benefit business owners in a significant way. So, what can business owners do?

Business Owners are Best Suited to SEO Themselves

Like I told Bob, and like most of you know, it’s all about inbound links. Sure there are dozens of other important factors, but nothing can touch the significance of quality inbound links. For you business owners that may be confused, inbound links = links to your website on other websites. No time to get into the reason and rhyme behind it. Just accept it.

Let’s say you hire me to improve your company’s ranking for “nail polish remover.” What am I gonna do? I’m going to outsource generic link-building all over the place and charge you a huge premium for it. Will your rankings improve? Probably a bit. Will you experience the sort of results I led you to dream about when I was pitching my service? Probably not. The reason for this is that the links I will be acquiring for you will be cheap, weak links that anyone with a lot of time or $ on their hands can gather in large quantities. But these types of links generally won’t create big, sustainable ranking improvements.

I Can Has Good Links?

Yes, most likely, you can has. Especially if you’ve been in your current business for a while. Why? Because chances are, you’ve already made valuable contacts and have opportunities to get links that no one else could grab. Think about the other companies you routinely do business with. How many of them have established websites? How is your relationship with them? Would they be willing to link to your site with the anchor text “nail polish remover?”

These links are infinitely more valuable. In most cases they are from very relevant, often aged sites with minimal outbound links. And they definitely aren’t linking to random skin care, get rich quick, or get a bigger dick sites.

Sure, if you have a really good SEO company, they will work with you to attempt to get these links, but most won’t. And even the ones that do are most likely going to charge you an arm and a leg to do it.

My advice if you’re hellbent on enlisting outside SEO services: go ahead and hire whichever SEO company has the shiniest graphics on their site, and let them do the supplemental link building, ALONG with shaking down your friends and colleagues with websites to give you those precious exclusive links.

Quick SEO Checklist for Business Owners:

• •Get those dang links.
• •Optimize your site title with whatever term you’re trying to rank for. In other words, the title of the home page in the top of your browser should be “nail polish remover.” Not “home”!
• •The text used to link to your site, aka “anchor text”, is important. You want it to be a healthy combination of the term you’re trying to rank for and variatons of that term. For example, “nail polish remover”, “buy nail polish remover”, “ethyl acetate”, etc.
• •Send me 60% of quarterly profits.

Oh, by the way, Bob, here is the whole concept of this post put into action: Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer. Heh!

You may recall a post of mine not too long ago about using Google Insight to find hot new niches. The site I’m about to talk about was originally built because of that same simple method. I recently sold it, so I thought I would immortalize its memory by making this post.

Out of consideration for the new owner, I’m not going to discuss the niche or show the URL here. If you are dying of curiosity, message me for more info. But for goodness sakes, don’t obsess about niche specifics. Find your own gold!

I will now detail exactly what I did to quickly rank n’ bank with this one. I will assume you read the post about Google Insight, so we will skip that step. Actually, that’s not even a step, that’s a pre-step. So, here we go:

Step One – Building a Product Filled Site
Using PhpBay for WordPress, it is easy to create lots and lots of pages with stuff your visitors are hopefully looking for. Because PhpBay results are html based, the SE’s still see it as unique(ish) content. You can tweak the settings so that duplicate results are omitted, adding to its uniqueness. I use a WP plugin called Duplicate Post to make it easy to create lots of similar pages where I may just be making one small tweak from the original (i.e., red widget to blue, to yellow, etc). I ended up with something like 300 different product pages, the vast majority of which contained no content other than the relevant listings pulled from Ebay. The ever popular All in One SEO plugin was used to take care of on-site SEO.

3 pages of additional relevant content without any product listings were added and linked to in the sidebar. The Google XML Sitemap plugin was used to generate a sitemap which was linked to in the footer.

Step Two – Disregard Team Fortress 2, Acquire Links
Keep in mind that we are trying to rank n’ bank here, not necessarily build a site for long-term revenue. Then again, sometimes you get long-term revenue anyway, but for all intents and purposes, I was looking for short-term gains here. Because of this, a hefty dose of dodgy link building was applied.

Utilizing my 2k links/day Drip Feed Blasts subscription, I blasted 2k direct profile links per week to the site. Thanks to the set-it-and-forget-it nature of DFB, this was easily achieved with minimal effort. I also ran Drip Feed Login regularly. If you’re familiar, DFL is a program included with a DFB subscription (are you keeping up?) that you install locally on your machine and run that periodically logs into the xrumer generated profiles created by DFB, causing links to your profiles to appear on the homepages of the respective forum targets where it shows the users currently online. Pretty neat, right??

I used a couple different blog networks to generate around 300 in-content links in various spun articles.

I suppose I should have mentioned earlier that the domain was a hyphenated EMD (exact match domain). I used very little anchor text variation in most of the links I generated. Mostly singular/plural versions of the main keyword.

I spent probably an hour at most doing manual blog commenting. I used two relevant sites of my own to link to the new site from their respective sidebars.

Total Time Spent
Had I had known I was going to blog about this site from the beginning, I guess I would have kept better records. Estimations will have to do.

I would say that total time spent from researching the niche, building the site, and building the links, I probably spent somewhere in the ball park of 6-8 hours.

Revenue
Prior to being sold the site was making a steady $400-$450 month. It sold for a little over 3 grand. The total revenue after the sale was $5,362.59.

Why Sell?
This is the main question I get when selling any site, and I take it as a compliment. Because of the niche, and despite the high volume of clicks it was sending to Ebay, the traffic was pretty low quality. I didn’t like running a campaign with Ebay with such a low EPC. So, I decided to cut it. But I think in the right hands it could be tweaked and made into something much better. You know, by someone willing to spend more than half a day on it.

I know this case study is not very organized and lacks fancy graphics. I probably left out something important, too. Feel free to ask any questions you may have below.

EDIT

Okay I forgot something many of you will probably find pretty important. The site IS currently sandboxed on Google. Not de-indexed, mind you, but it ranks on like page 10 or something for its main keyword. This sandboxing happened soon into the site’s life. It still received (and still receives) hundreds of unique visitors per day thanks to prominent rankings on Yahoo! and Bing.

Some backlinks of actual quality would probably easily revive the site on Google.