Keyword Sniper Case Study #1
December 31st, 2007 by CourtSince I wrote the Introduction To Keyword Sniping I have been asked probably 200 times (no exaggeration) to show you a site that I’m doing this with. This is just plain stupid for me to show you, but I’m going to do it anyway. Since it would be suicide to show you a site that’s already established, I have decided to set up a brand new site to show you exactly how build a site that can make you a healthy profit.
Keyword Selection
The keywords I have decided to use for this case study are ‘colorado lasik’ and ‘colorado lasik surgery’. Before I get too far into this, let me explain why I selected these keywords. These keywords are from a teeny, tiny niche, in fact each of them is only searched for between 100-150 times each day. Seems to be a pretty small number right? That only gives me a maximum of about 300 searches between my two main keywords.When I choose keywords for a niche site, I always choose keywords that I know I can get ranked #1 for. ‘Colorado lasik surgery’ returns less than 10,000 results when searched for Google in quotes and a quick examination of the sites in the top 10 in Google shows me that none of them have the keyword in the HTML title tag. The #1 ranked site is a PR3 without the keyword in the title, and this means that I can take that spot over without hardly any trouble.
Now let’s say that I max out on this site with 200 hits per day. Will that give me enough to make it worth my time? I usually assume that I can get at least 5% Adsense click-through on a site like this. That will give me 10 clicks per day. Based on past experience with LASIK I can tell you that clicks are worth $1-4 each so that will probably make me $10-40 per day. I’m estimating that I’ll be able to make at least $500 per month from this site, once I get it ranked #1 in Google for those two keywords. That is without question worth my time, even though the niche is tiny.
Many of you at this point are going to ask why you would want to mess with a site that is going to max out at $500 per month. The answer is simple - this kind of site requires almost no maintenance. After the initial setup, I will probably only spend around 15 minutes per month on this site. Is $500 worth 15 minutes of your time? I could easily maintain over 100 sites like this, and every one of them would be a legit site.
Domain Selection
The ideal is to find a domain that has been in Google’s index for at least one year, but in this case that wasn’t possible. Since there are less than 10,000 pages in Google’s index that contain my keywords, it’s very likely that I can rank well with a domain that is brand new right now. I decided to use a domain that contained my keywords for a ranking boost - I went with ColoradoLasikSurgeryGuide.com. You can have a look at the site here: Colorado Lasik Surgery.
Every domain that you choose to use will have strengths and weaknesses. This domain has some inherent weaknesses:
- It’s brand new
- It’s not great for branding purposes (too long)
However, it also has a huge strength:
- It contains both of my main keywords
If the niche is very small, you don’t have to worry about branding as much as you do on a large site. My goal with this site is to get search traffic - not to gain a repeat visitor audience. We’ll see how the domain age affects me. One of two things will happen:
- I will be able to rank now for my terms because the niche is quite small.
- The domain will get sandboxed for about 6 six months. If this is the case, I won’t be able to rank well now but will suddenly wake up one morning in about six months to find that I am ranked #1 in Google.
I’ve had this go both ways. Most of the time I’m able to sidestep the sandbox in small niches so it’s worth the risk. If I do get sandboxed it doesn’t matter - I have other projects like this in the works and many of them are using domains that are over a year old.
Site Development
Setting up the site is really easy. Since I purchased the domain from ProudDomains.com, I can use free hosting until my traffic comes. When you were at the site you probably noticed that there are some ads across the top. ProudDomains will let you host the site for free and they put their ads there. Once the site starts to get traffic, I will upgrade to economy hosting ($4 per month). That means that the maximum amount of money I will spend on this site before it starts producing is the $8 I spent on the domain name. If the site gets sandboxed, it won’t cost me anything for hosting until it gets out.
Once I set up my free hosting, I installed WordPress. In my lesson on ‘Starting A Blog‘, I explain exactly how to do that. I’m using the Keyword Sniper theme, and have activated one plugin - the All-In-One SEO Pack. I will be installing more plugins in the future but there’s no need to get carried away right now.
Content Development
I always go with the legit content approach. That means I have been locating LASIK surgeons and LASIK vision centers in the Colorado area to write about. To be honest, this will lower my click-through rate for Adsense somewhat. If I just wrote keyword rich nonsense, people would be more likely to click on ads.
I go with the more legit approach because this helps me to get natural links and also ensures that the site won’t get trashed if a Google search engineer happens to find it. By going with legit content, you can ensure that the site will be around forever. So far I’ve written four posts and it took about 30 minutes. I will be adding around six more so that I have ten solid posts of legit content. That will probably take me about another 60 minutes or so of work.
I also added a few extra pages to the site:
- Contact
- Terms and Conditions
- Privacy Policy
- About
Getting The Site Indexed
I’m going to start pointing some links at the site to get it indexed. Although there are techniques that I could use to get the site indexed today, I’m not in a huge hurry. Since I’m trying to avoid Google’s sandbox on a brand new domain, I’m not going to use any aggressive techniques. I’m simply going to point some links at the site (like the one in this post) and wait for a few days.
Update: Despite being one day old the site is already getting indexed. Four of the first five posts are in Google’s index right now. All I did to make this happen was link to it from CourtneyTuttle.com once.
Search Engine Optimization
I literally didn’t have to make a single change to the site for SEO purposes. The Keyword Sniper theme is ready to go for SEO right ‘out of the box’. All I have to do now is start to get anchor text links to the site. I will, of course vary the anchor text between quite a few different sets of text:
- Colorado Lasik
- Colorado Lasik Surgery
- Colorado Lasik Surgery Guide
- Lasik in Colorado
- Colorado Lasik Surgeons
- Lasik Surgery Colorado
- Lasik Colorado
The Future
The future of this case study will be quite interesting. This site could be #1 in Google within a month, or it could get sandboxed. Either way, the $8 I spent will be an incredible investment for me. I will continue to update you on its progress. If the site lands in the sandbox we will move on to a new case study while we wait it out. I have some other domains that I’m developing that aren’t brand new.
Please feel free to ask questions. Since we basically just built an entire site from the ground up I’m sure that there are things we will need to clarify. Don’t be shy!
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December 31st, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Keyword Sniper Case Study #1
Alright guys the time has come for you to be able to look at a case study of keyword sniping. Since many of you have asked, I decided to create a site from scratch for you.
I went through the entire process: choosing keywords, buying a domain, setti…
December 31st, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Good info Court.
One thing I’d like for you to address at some point would be Adsense “smart pricing” and how to avoid it. As I found out recently it sucks to have your sites that were making $10-20 a day go to less than 50 cents a day. Hopefully having Adsense on OpTempo was the problem and removing it from there will correct the problem in a week or so.
Another question would be on using subdomains. Of course, that impacts resale potential but does it impact SEO?
And one last one, would it be advisable to remove date references, such as a “posted on” date, since you want the info to be more or less timeless?
December 31st, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Hey Frank!
Ok I will create an article on smart pricing soon, but here are the basics to get you started.
Having Adsense on OpTempo is probably what your problem was. If a site drops below 2% CTR you are in the danger zone. I started getting less than 1% CTR on CourtneyTuttle.com and I got smart priced. After removing Adsense from this site I got my full payout back within 5 days.
Smart pricing affects your entire Adsense account (all sites that use that account).
I would remove Adsense from any site that gets less than 3% CTR. The other option is to remove it from poorly performing pages.
Using a new subdomain will be like using a brand new domain. An aged domain will get better results and an aged subdomain will get better results. Other than that, it will not affect SEO.
On a site like this, it probably would be wise to remove dates actually, good idea.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Is that less than 3% on a daily average, weekly average or what? I have my good and bad days…
December 31st, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Ok I am understanding what you mean by keywords finaly. But my question to you is how many keywords should I use in my all in one SEO plug in and with in my sites control panel.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I only choose one or two main keywords for each site Collin. That means I would put at the most two keywords in those locations.
In the case of this case study, all I have in there is ‘Colorado Lasik Surgery’ because that covers both ‘Colorado Lasik’ and Colorado Lasik Surgery’.
December 31st, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Nice article.
Why is it that you’re doing a free hosting thing? Isn’t it the case that with lots of hosting providers you can host tons of domains for around $8 per month?
December 31st, 2007 at 4:05 pm
If you do that you have to manage the hosting accounts. I don’t have time to manage hosting accounts.
Once a site makes a profit, I start paying a couple bucks per month to have it hosted.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Court,
Thanks for the case study! I was tempted to ask for a domain of yours to look at, but I thought better of it.
Question regarding the way you have set up the theme. Your sidebars are set up different then the way the Sniper Theme comes out of the box.
I assume you just used the Presentation>Widgets page to arrange the sidebars as you currently have them. Is this correct?
Also, is this sidebar arrangement you have typical of what you use on your niche blogs?
Thanks again for the case study!
-Marshall
December 31st, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Hey Lizard! Yes I used Widgets to reorganize the sidebars. It really isn’t going to make a huge difference how they’re organized - I did it so that the tags would be there.
That’s pretty typical of how I set it up though.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Court,
And the tag cloud is there for SEO purposes, right?
-Marshall
December 31st, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Yep!
June 23rd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
OK, another Newb question (just learning Wordpress). I had the same quesitn as Marshall about the diff. between your layout and the snipe layout. You mention the ‘Tag Cloud’ and adding that to the sidebar but I can’t find that under widgets?
December 31st, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Ok Court, be honest with me here, how effective would this be if I used a wordpress.com site. In your case coloradolasik.wordpress.com.
or a Blogger site.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Ok here’s some brutal honesty. People that aren’t willing to spend $8 for a domain name need to re-evaluate their financial goals.
I’ve probably spent $8 on Mountain Dew this week and people aren’t willing to spend it to start a business.
As far as I know you can’t even run Adsense on WordPress.com and I wouldn’t use it anyway.
If I can make $500 per month I can sell the site for over $7000. If you make $500 on a Blogger blog you can’t sell it for anything. If you make $500 on a WordPress.com blog you can’t sell it for anything.
You don’t have enough control over either one of those services to get maximum results.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Thank you for your honesty. I just wanted to see what your thoughts were.
So, since you’re using it also, I’m guessing that my best route would be to use the hosting service you are with?
December 31st, 2007 at 4:22 pm
In all honesty it doesn’t really matter what hosting company you use.
I use that one because I can set up free hosting while I’m waiting to turn a profit.
There are a lot of different options out there but this one is a little easier to use than some of the others.
January 1st, 2008 at 6:25 pm
since you’re on the subject…..can you sell a typepad blog? thanks Court. (another awesome post, btw!)
December 31st, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Court, your latest series of keyword sniping posts have been extremely helpful to me and obviously to many others as well. I love how you don’t exaggerate, provide real examples, and give the information as-is.
After reading your first post about keyword sniping I did some research and already have a couple of sites planned out, which I’m going to start up soon. I intend on using Amazon as well with some of the terms I’ve chosen.
Thanks for sharing what you know.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:43 pm
You’re welcome Tay! Happy to hear that it has helped you out.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:36 pm
This is a really stupid question Court, but I honestly don’t know - how do I see how many times a keyword is searched each month/day and what the value of a click is worth?
Thanks
December 31st, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Finding keyword volume is covered in the original article on keyword sniping:
http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/12/20/introduction-to-keyword-sniping/
The best way to really find out how much a click is worth is to sign up for an Adwords account and look at how much it would cost to bid to the top of the list for your keyword. The keyword will be worth roughly 50% of what people are paying for clicks.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:52 pm
“If I can make $500 per month I can sell the site for over $7000. If you make $500 on a Blogger blog you can’t sell it for anything. If you make $500 on a WordPress.com blog you can’t sell it for anything.”
Court, if I use a Blogger platform but with a customed domain name, will that make it different? And will I’ll be able to sell it later at $7,000…that is if the blog is making $500?
December 31st, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Yeah Markk that would work. The only thing you’ll lose if you do that is the full functionality of WordPress. I just installed the Related Posts plugin, and that will give me an advantage over what you would be able to do with Blogger.
However, to answer your question - If you used a Blogger platform and got to $500 per month with your own domain, yes, it could be sold for the same amount.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Thanks for this nice theme! A couple of questions…
1. What are the best adsense formats? (Ads Code #1)
2. When a site is new, should ads be placed on the homepage?
3. Is there hope for getting out of ’smart pricing’ if a site had had this stigma attached to it?
Thanks in advance,
Joshua
December 31st, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I would probably go with a large rectangle that pushed the content in the post down for the best CTR.
Yes, it’s ok to place ads on the homepage.
Yes you can get away from smart pricing if you can raise your CTR to above 2% (this is an estimate and it will be better to get it above 3%) - it usually takes about a week.
December 31st, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Court,
This also answered a question I was about to ask on AdSense placement. Thanks for another great article.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Does it matter if we register a “.net” or should we shoot for a .com
December 31st, 2007 at 5:13 pm
A .com domain will generally have a higher resale value, but there won’t be any difference in rankings between the two.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Great info Court! Just what I have been wondering about for my niche sites. Thanks also for answering the question about Adsense, but at what point should you put it on your site? Is there a certain magic number of traffic that you should put it on, or just put it on from the beginning?
Thanks!
December 31st, 2007 at 5:38 pm
On a niche site you can go ahead and put it up from the beginning. I can’t put it on the Colorado Lasik Surgery Guide because I have too many of you guys going to it right now. A few hundred people have already been on that site today, and it wouldn’t have produced any clicks.
The low CTR would have screwed up my Adsense account. After that traffic goes away and I start to get search traffic I’ll ad Adsense.
You should add it from the beginning.
December 31st, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Thanks for the reply Court, the only problem that I am having is that I get a lot of page views or impressions, but a few or no clicks on some of my lower traffic sites right now.
Does that ruin the ranking on my higher impression sites that don’t have the best click ratio?
January 1st, 2008 at 11:28 am
I would look at the CTR for December in your Adsense account. You can look at each site and if those sites aren’t getting any clicks over that period they will be a problem.
You don’t need to worry about it if a site doesn’t get any clicks in a day - if they never get clicks though you want to take Adsense off.
May 18th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Well, it has been almost five months since you set up the site, but I can see no AdSense advertising on it. I am sure that the number of people who visit the website from the link in this post has declined to a number that can not affect your CTR. What’s the reason for not having adsense if this is the only way you were planning on to monetize the site? I do not want to sound mean, since I am a newbie and I have learned a lot of things from your blog. I am just curious.
All the best. I really like your practical, down-to-earth approach to the web business.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Court, what ever happened to howtomobile.com? Did that strategy fail? At the time you claimed you were going to make $10,000 per month, so I decided to watch to see if you could do it. http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/07/21/saturday-case-study-howtomobilecom-week-7/
What happened to that project?
December 31st, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Don’t worry Patrick you haven’t heard the last of that site. HowToMobile was placed in Google’s sandbox - which means you wait it out until it gets out and then get after it again.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Thank you so much for doing this Court. I think that this will really help me. I am a very hands on person and seeing a real life example is a huge help.
When I look up Colorado lasik and Colorado lasik surgery in GTrends (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/) GTrends shows that Colorado lasik has 52,000 competing pages and less than 5 searches a day. Why the huge disparity between Wordtracker and GTrends?
Colorado lasik surgery in Gtrends has 9,640 competing pages and less than 5 searches a year. Do you trust wordtracker? Isn’t wordtracker’s figures showing Yahoo Overture data?
ACCKKKK!! I hate this keyword research.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Fred you just have to do the best you can with all of the tools available. Gtrends is a really new tool and I haven’t used it enough to trust it.
I keep telling everyone that I use Wordze and that it’s the service that I trust the most. Fred listen to me… Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze Wordze…
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 pm
I know, I know, you are going to reply with Wordze, Wordze…but I had the same question as Fred. Per your post #1, I put “colorado lasik surgery” into Wordtracker and it says: Nos KEI Analysis, Count, 24Hrs, Competing, Keyword ===================================================
1, 0.039, 5, 1, 636, colorado lasik laser eye surgery vision correction
Hard to understand what it is trying to tell me. For some reason it wants to use all the variations and not the specific keyword. Maybe this is the free version? Any hints for a newbie?
Thanks!
December 31st, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Lol, What was that tool again?
January 1st, 2008 at 11:28 am
December 31st, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Content and quality let make that our goal on the http://www.
A reflection of lame ideas
December 31st, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Court, I really enjoyed your first post on keyword sniping and now this!…both of these have been so helpful (especially to a newbie such as myself). Thanks!~ Julie
December 31st, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Can you go into more detail on the sandbox? What specifically is this? Based on this post, it doesn’t appear to mean not being indexed, at least. Does it just mean you can’t get pagerank?
December 31st, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Robert sandbox is something Google never talks about but all of us that have being doing this for a while sooner or later learn the hard way.
Sandbox is designed to filter real sites from spam sites. In givin days their could be 100k or more spam sites born Google can not visually inspect all them so when a brand new domains starts generating some decent traffic and start ranking high on SERPS your site gets send to sandbox.
What this does is basically it takes away real keyword authority on high search or really competitive terms in other words let’s say you where position one in google for “motorola” when your site get’s sent to sandbox you wake up in the morning and now you are on page 5000 of Google with the same term.
Just the fact that Court was sent to sandbox more then proves that he already had a wining site now as soon as he gets out of the box bam he gets his ranking back and the site becomes a money maker again.
January 1st, 2008 at 12:46 am
So you can (theoretically) ramp up more slowly and maybe avoid it?
Also, is there a “typical” sandbox timeframe that you might get boxed in for?
January 1st, 2008 at 11:30 am
Vic gave a great explanation of the sandbox. It usually only gets you if you try to target competitive terms Robert.
If you get sandboxed it usually sticks for about six months.
January 1st, 2008 at 1:11 am
[…] submit_url = ‘http://bloggerunleashed.com/niche-blogging/adsense-niche-case-study/’;This goes with Courts Keyword Sniper Case Study #1 now id you have not read it go and read it first because I am applying the same thing but to […]
January 1st, 2008 at 8:44 am
It has taken me a few times of reading and rereading to understand the full impact of this strategy. It has however been worth it and after reading all the comments and your clarifications, the whole matter has become quite clear.
Thank you.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:33 am
Another very interesting post I enjoyed reading Court. My question would be when you’re looking for the search results, you mentioned 10,000 results would help you rank high for the term. What is the max # you would shoot for in terms of results to rank high, 50k? 300k?
January 1st, 2008 at 11:57 am
Generally speaking the higher the competition the harder it will be. I personally have taken on keywords that have huge competition because I know I can do it.
I would try to always keep it under 1,000,000 competing pages but again your question isn’t black and white. It’s a scale - the lower the better.
January 1st, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Unless you are completely insane and wanting to conquer the world! Then you could go for the next to impossible, but with the help and advice of Vic, Grizz and Court, you can do it!
January 1st, 2008 at 11:42 am
Court,
Just to clarify, if we install All in One SEO plugin on the Keyword Sniper theme, we would still fill out the Home Title, Home Description, and Home Keywords on the Options>All in One SEO page, right?
Also, can you please explain the feature of “I added a dynamic link section to the footer file that allows Keyword Sniper 1.0 to make a site-wide, anchor text link back to your homepage” that you mention in your post introducing the theme. Is this footer link the name of your site in the copyright notice?
Thanks!
-Marshall
January 1st, 2008 at 11:59 am
Yes that’s right Lizard. You would fill those out.
Yes it is the name of your site in the dynamic link. That means you have to have your keyword as the name of your site.