7 Mistakes I Made Ranking a Niche Site (12k Exact Matches/Month) & How I Still Made it On Top

When looking around for relevant information on how to rank a website for its keywords, there is entirely so much information out there that it’s hard to get started. Not to mention, the information can be contradictory and as soon as you think you have it all down, you discover a whole new set of guidelines to be followed before you launch your new site.

So who do you listen to? Which path do you take?! Should I listen to the guru who makes $100k a month or $400k a month?!!

Today, I’m about to share with you details regarding my exact match .biz domain. I first mentioned this site when I announced my involvement in a niche site duel. This is a site that I have managed to rank in eight months but the road has been so full of uncertainty that finally getting it to where I want it seems like a grand accomplishment.

Now I know that I can do anything I want, it’s only a matter of “figuring things out” by being persistent and testing. But before we get all wishy washy, let’s dig into the background and read about how you can do the same thing I have done.

Why I Chose a .biz Domain

Talk to the pros and they will guide you to acquire an exact match domain whenever possible. However, there is another common practice in search engine optimization that persists acquiring a .com, .net or .org is way, way better than any other top level domain and that you will have a much easier time ranking your site for a specific keyword.

In case you can’t find an exact match domain, it is suggested to generate a keyphrase that contains the keyword in it. For example, if “dogtraining” .com, .net and .org are already registered, you can opt for “dogtrainingmadeeasy.com” or “dogtrainingexperts.com”.

Instead of going down this route, I chose to stick to an exact match domain. In my case, only the .biz domain was available. Since I’m all about experimentation, I opted for the exactmatchdomain.biz and launched my site.

The Journey to Ranking This Domain

There are many words I could use to complete this sentence. I was able to rank the .us domain I bought along with this domain (in a totally unrelated niche) within three months. This one? More like seven months full of uncertainty and wondering what I was doing wrong.

Using Blog Blueprint, I was able to rank my .biz domain in the top 300 of Google. But there were cycles when it would drop out of the 1000 Google search results, then come back again.

What’s a girl to do when Google insists on dancing the lambada when all she wants is take a corner seat?

My next course of action involved a couple of link wheels [which I detail in my free, no opt-in report]. This brought the site in the top 30 of Google.

Almost there but not quite! How frustrating!

After that, it was a random creation of pyramids (involving web 2.0 posts, forum profiles, and more) and direct social bookmarking. This only helped it to rank in the top 16-20 of Google.

If ranking a site in the top 10 of Google search results seems like pulling teeth, it most definitely can be especially in competitive niches. I won’t sugarcoat this! That’s why there’s a whole profession based on search engine optimization and marketing.

But I knew I was heading in the right direction…

In a matter of a few lines, I’ve shown you the progress this .biz domain made from ranking in top 1000 to top 20. However, that alone took close to six months.

In those six months, I could have easily given up on this domain (I do remember whimpering like a hurt puppy on five different occassions) and stopped building backlinks for it. Instead, I decided to outsource the link building and to keep creating content for this stubborn domain.

I’m glad to reveal that thanks to my persistence with more backlinking efforts, this domain now sits very pretty in Google.

What Do the Numbers Reveal?

The Google Keyword Tool is fun to start off keyword research with and gives good overall information that you can use as a starting point:

Because I believe in researching further than the obvious factors you see here, I used Market Samurai to give me more information before I selected this keyphrase and niche:

The number of searches is only 8100 because I changed the project settings to show the number of searches conducted within the United States only (world-wide searches is over 10,000 per month).

SEOT shows the number of clicks a site would receive if it ranked #1 for this keyphrase. In this example, a site ranking #1 for the main keyphrase should expect around 3,402 visitors in one month out of the 8100 queries.

The numbers all here seem pretty daunting and to be honest, the top 10 competition only made the keyphrase seem daunting:

RDD and RDP are two new data fields that Market Samurai just added but if you look at the BLP column, you can see that anywhere from hundreds to thousands (113,000+) backlinks point to the ranked pages.

Yikes!

Looking at it now, it still seems a bit intimidating.

Before I reveal how well this particular .biz domain is ranking, first I want to share with you 7 guidelines that I was suppose to follow but failed to:

Mistake 1: Choosing a .biz domain

I lightly touched on this earlier. Most internet marketers drill the importance of registering a .com, .net or .org. While I’m all for this, it’s getting harder and harder to find exact match domains especially with these TLDs. Perhaps a .com would have started ranking in the first three months, perhaps not. I went with a .biz domain nevertheless! And I don’t regret it

Mistake 2: Choosing a Non-Competitive Niche

Oopsies! While the on-page factors for the top 10 competition don’t look bad at all, the sheer number of backlinks to the ranking pages seem a tad high (7/10 sites have over a thousand backlinks…). It does come down to the quality of those backlinks but still…

Apparently, this didn’t deter me when it was suppose to.

Mistake 3: Create a Niche Site with Decent Number of Pages

This isn’t something I’m necessarily proud of but since this site is still in the works, it gives me a huge goal to look forward to accomplishing.

Thanks to the Panda update, the safest practice now is to create an authority site. Some people think that having an authority site is akin to having a site with a huge number of pages. Not true but I digress.

This .biz domain contains the typical five pages: “Home”, “About”, “Resources”, “Contact”… and a not-so-typical page.

As I add more posts, I will also add two more pages titled “Start Here” and “What to Expect”. But as you can see, I have no more than four pages set up currently.

Mistake 4: Create a Good Number of Posts When Launching

The more original content on your site, the more you are helping and engaging your readers (helps with engagement and conversions later). The better and more relevant your content, the more Google likey.

This is why it’s quite important to launch a niche site with 5-7 detailed posts that answer your readers questions & helps them. The more Google likes, the better the site’s ranking. It’s not a 100% of the ranking algorithm but it’s a big part of it. Stop cutting corners here and either dedicate your own time to great content or hire someone to do it!

I launched the site with five articles in the queue publishing every 2-3 days. This gave me enough time to add images where relevant, edit content if needed and to use the proper tags/keywords.

I believe I started off with okay but should have provided more quality content instead of posting content for content’s sake!

Mistake 5: Use a Good Theme

I have been using an old, free theme for a couple of my niche sites and I’m paying the price now with conversions. Spend some money on a good theme that you can master and use over and over later, saving you time and money in the long run.

I believe this is costing me conversions but this can only be verified with a better theme and some testing. My current theme makes it hard to distinguish links from regular text and is super bland.

Mistake 6: Use a Graphic Header

Apparently not a necessity since I have been doing without one. But the lack of a nice graphic logo/header does add to my .biz domain looking super dull and boring. A good graphic header should add to the appeal factor of the site and could sway the readers to stay on the site a few seconds (or minutes) more.

Mistake 7: Create Backlinks Consistently

This is kind of bs. You should do this moreso for the sake of keeping up with your work, not the search engines. If you think about any big site, does it gain two backlinks a day every day? No!

There are always some posts and pages that do well throughout the month and some that don’t. I have been outsourcing backlinks and I know sometimes they are created right away and sometimes in small bursts over the time period of 2-3 days (or sometimes a month long campaign).

Mix it up, kids!

What Should You Take Away From All of This?

I didn’t take hours to compose this post for my own vain pleasures (okay, maybe a little!) But in all seriousness, you should know that hard work pays off. As you can see, I didn’t follow the general guidelines but I did more than okay, as evidenced by this sexy little image:

Scroogle shows the ranking to be #5 instead of #4 like Google. Not bad at all, right?

Whether you decide to give into laziness or your mind that is full of doubt or you choose to push past all that is entirely upto you. Ranking my .biz domain has taught me a lot of valuable lessons as has ranking the site that I never thought I’d be able to (details in my other free ebook).

Of course, I’m not saying that if you can follow the guidelines, not to. Even if you don’t follow them, as long as you work hard consistently, you can still get there. It may be a bit harder and require more work and time but rest assured, you’ll be glad you did.

What’s Next for my .biz Domain?

Improvements of all kinds. I seriously think that there is a lot of potential of earning a good income with this site. However to get there, I have a lot of work to do.

What’s next for my .biz domain is better, more engaging content which should help with e-mail list conversions. Even though I am receiving decent traffic, my lead magnet obviously sucks since people aren’t signing up:

Furthermore, I really want to improve the bounce rate and average time on this site:

Obviously this is a niche site and the main source of visitors is people searching on Google. I think by simply posting content that is engaging could help with email list conversions. You bet I’ll be working my tail off to come up with three lengthy posts and a whole new lead magnet.

Currently I’m running a survey on the site to determine and analyze what these web searchers are looking for. Integrating this into my content will be key for me to make any money from this niche site.

What challenges are you facing with your niche site? Is it creating content, building backlinks or conversions?

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