Search Engine Optimisation Training Course

Lesson No.1 - Learn How to Sort Out the Competition.

by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au

The SEO training course that you are about to embark has valuable information for anyone wanting to earn income by generation quality traffic to their website.  

This information is what most other reputable SEOs will cite as best practice in Search Engine Optimisation.

If you want to know more about Internet Marketing, or Search Engine Optimisation call Bruce on 0417 251 911 or send an email to bruce@searchengine-guy.com.au 

This is mainly why many website owners do not grasp, and this is why they struggle to get decent rankings and traffic early on in the peace.

When you develop a niche marketing strategy, which is targeted on a specific theme rather than very general topics, it is a lot easier to get results in the short term.  This is because you are then competing with fewer sites on the internet.

At the same time your traffic would be much more targeted and therefore convert better.

When you take on competition that is too strong and very well established, it is nearly a given that your site will not be found in even the first ten pages of results. Alternatively, if you try to get too focussed, you may find that the traffic isn't worth your while. So the answer is to do your research so that you are not wasting time trying to fight an unbeatable battle, or fight for something not worth the effort.

Remember, your great idea doesn't mean anything if you can't transform your efforts into income or other goals. 

Depending on your industry, the methods of monetizing your website will vary and fall into these categories:

• Ecommerce – selling physical or digital goods/products

• Services – selling your time as a consultation or your skills

• Advertising – selling ad space on your website or directory

• Affiliate Marketing – selling other people’s product and getting a commission for it.

Whichever methods you intend to use, you should have a very clear idea of what your bottom line is in terms of money and time invested in the website or blog to be worth your while.

I won't go into this very much as you would have most of the information need in your business and marketing plans. I'm assuming that you already have one in place? If you don't, I suggest that you either put one together yourself or get one made up by a professional such as Scott Tyler from www.iibe.com.au

As an example, let's image that I want to create a new website selling bottles of pest control spray.

After crunching some figures, I know that I’ll be making $1 profit for each bottle sold, and based on the marketing strategy I have established, I estimate that I’ll be able to sell 2 bottles to each customer in average.

Now, based on my expenses and personal needs, I want $2,000 of net profit per month to make this project worthwhile.

Converting Financial Needs Into Traffic Volume
The average conversion rate online is 1-2%, if you do better good for you, but for our example, we are going to base ourselves on a 2% conversion rate.

Based on the data we have, I need 1,000 orders to be placed on my store each month.

With a 2% conversion rate, that would bring my required traffic volume to be 50,000 visitors each month, or about 1,700 daily.

Analytics in SEO have demonstrated that a #1 ranking in Google will get you about 25% of the traffic volume for that specific keyword, and having #1 and #2 listings, would get you about 60% of the traffic volume for that search term.

Although getting a #1 listing is our goal, it’s really not easy to obtain, but even so, it would mean that we’d be getting only 25% of the traffic volume for a given keyword, which for us lead to the conclusion that the main keyword we should be targeting needs a search volume of at least 170,000 to be viable for us at the very least.

Just to be safe, I would rather be looking into the 340,000 search volume at least (double the minimum traffic required).

Checking the Analytics
In order to check the search volume for my niche “pest control spray” I will be using a free SEO tool called the Google AdWords Keyword Tool

This will provide valuable information as to which keywords are searched on Google and what is the search volume for these searches.

Another great point is that you have many filtering capabilities to target your market effectively including geographic location. I also use this tool to gauge the pricing of keywords.  This is pretty much invaluable when searching for themes to earn money on Google Adsense.  I will show you exactly how to do that in a later lesson.

In our example, I’m only interested to sell to people living in Australia.

The process is very simple, just type the search term you want to analyse, enter the captcha code and click “Get Keyword Ideas”.

A list of search results will be populated with different variations based on the popularity of a search term and the relevancy to your search query.

As for our niche keyword, we can see a search volume of of only 260 searches – this fails our test.

This search term is too narrow and may not reflect accurately the market we are targeting.

Nonetheless, it’s good to keep an open mind as it will give us some room to expand further down the road as our business will do better.

We’ll learn more on how to qualify our keywords in a later lesson.

Exercise
Whether you are starting a brand new site or currently are running one, check your analytics and ensure that your niche is viable for your business and your expectations (those may be higher than your business needs).

Make sure that your niche is not too broad like “gift” where the competition is unimaginable, or too narrow like “traditional Chinese gift” which may not have enough search volume to monetize your work.

Keep in mind that because today you are selling Chinese gifts, doesn’t mean that later on you may not want to sell Japanese gifts or Korean gifts; think about that and don’t just corner yourself.

If during this exercise you realize that your niche is wrong, just scale it up or down a bit (if you don’t know yet how to do that, don’t worry, in the next few days, you’ll know how to do all of that on your own).

1.   Learn How to Sort Out the Competition
2.   Do Your Keyword Research Homework
3.   Refining Your Keywords
4.   Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.   Mapping Your Site Structure
6.   Understanding Links & PageRank
7.   Sculpting Your Site Structure
8.   Cascading Style Sheet Design
9.   Using Wordpress for SEO
10. Setting up Your Analytics
11. Engineering the Title Tag
12. Optimising The Content
13. Optimising The Description Tag
14. Building Internal Links
15. SEO & Images
16. OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17. Link Building 101
18. Beating Your Competition
19. Building External Links
20. Using Structured SEO

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