Last year, I started a giant authority site project. The combined total of keyword searches for the 5 main keywords is 745,000 searches with the biggest one getting 245,000 searches per month. Did I think I would get that much traffic, passively all free traffic from Google when I started the project?
No. I expected more. As I noticed with all of my authority site projects, the traffic from long-tail keywords far outweighs the traffic from the main keywords. However, ranking for the main keywords (the most competitive, and most searches) maximizes the traffic I receive from long-tail searches.
Throughout all of last year, I slowly moved up. There were no sudden spikes. I went from page 10 to page 1 moving 4-5 spots at a time. It was really interesting to see. Usually for a lot of other easier keywords, I would point a few powerful links at it and I would see a big shoot up in rankings. Not for this site.
Well, today I woke up and saw that my main keywords were all ranking on page 1 with 2 of them at the #1 spot. It’s amazing because they’re all related to each other, just different phrases of the search query. So when one ranking moved up, it only made sense that the others would.
It’s crazy to see how much traffic you can really get for the really big search volume keywords. My traffic has more than doubled today. Yes, it’s that big of a keyword. I won’t be revealing my niche, as this is going to turn out to be one of my biggest money-making sites, and as I’ve mentioned before the income from my websites are my main source of income.
However, I’m going to be writing another post sharing everything about how I ranked this site, and how I discovered the keyword in the future, but for now, I just wanted to write about this big achievement here.
14 Comments
Chi
February 21, 2015 at 3:14 pmHi Chris,
I have some noob question about SEO,
The first is : how you build internal link for authority site?
The second is: What content you use to build-link?
Do you use spin content or rewrite content or content it-self from original ?
And what strategy you often use to buid-link? 😀
Thank,
Chi
P.S: sorry about my english 😀
Chris Lee
February 21, 2015 at 8:54 pmHey Chi,
You’re English is fine 🙂
For inter-linking, I link to past content when possible in new posts. Also, at the end of each post I list related posts, and links to the next and previous posts as well. I make sure my homepage, even if it is just a blog feed, links to my biggest pages targeting the biggest keywords. My biggest pages usually contain a lot of links to my other pages so that helps too.
I use my own content for link building.
For link building, I use a variety of methods. I recently talked about one of them here: https://www.rankxl.com/broken-link-building/. And I’ll be writing about more of these soon.
Chris
Tom
July 2, 2017 at 6:39 pmI’m sorry, but it should be “your English is fine”. You’re is not correct.
Chris Lee
July 10, 2017 at 10:16 amYour right 😉
Ali
September 27, 2015 at 10:09 amGreat Great Great!
I see lot of people moving out from SEO the last few years!
But, for me I see that they are living money in the table!
So that I stopped buying traffic from paid networks to promote CPA offers and I have decided to start with long term websites with SEO as main traffic source.
You know time is money, I don’t have more time to read SEO from scratch, even I have a good knowledge about it, I’m wondering to take your course!
What do you suggest for me?
Chris Lee
September 27, 2015 at 11:39 pmThey’re different strategies and you should focus on the one you prefer.
In the long run though, SEO is essential.
Imer Imran
October 4, 2016 at 1:56 amHi Chris
Nice article. I have a question for you. How many months do you need to get the #1 rankings for this keywords, how about the competition and how many links do you put on it?
Imer
Chris Lee
October 4, 2016 at 5:22 pmIt was only about 4-5 months after the site was started.
Maxwell Lawrence
February 9, 2017 at 1:12 amI am a newbie from Jamaica, but living here in Buffalo NY. I love your article and I love the knowledge you are sharing. I am looking forward to connect with you so you can teach me how to do what you do. God bless you. looking forward to connect with you teacher…
Maxwell
Chris Lee
February 9, 2017 at 10:17 pmThanks Maxwell 🙂 I removed your email address from your post. I can already see your email address in your comment as an admin. Best not to share it publicly.
Paul
March 19, 2017 at 3:04 pmHi Chris,
Thanks for inspriring all of us.
How about the competition? When doing keyword research, some tools like SEcockpit or other tools says some keywords are impossible to rank.
How to make a website with a few month authority get rank for ‘golden’ keywords while competition is very high?
Do you even take a look at the competition? I think domain age is not that important anymore, what do you think the main SEO factors are?
Cheers,
Paul
Chris Lee
March 30, 2017 at 4:29 pmHey Paul! Yes, competition is a factor. But if you look at it as building a business, and as building the #1 resource in your niche, you shouldn’t be creating content based on if you can rank for it easily, but more so if it’s going to be a helpful resource for your readers. Over time, even if you don’t rank #1, you can still drive long-tail traffic from them.
Tirupati Gumpula
July 12, 2017 at 5:13 pmCongratulations sir. That’s good for you. Did you add any backlinks in the course of time or they ranked naturally. Just excited to know.
Chris Lee
July 16, 2017 at 11:28 amThank you Tirupati!