You can see previous posts in this series by clicking this handy link.

Activity this week:

• Added some content. Nothing else

Planned activity:

• Forum profile creation (6000)
• Article spun and sent out via article syndication network
• *Might* do some more blog commenting and then ping them this time so they’re seen immediately
• Also tempted to do some commenting to an article page on the web (i.e. not my domain) to see if this increases the value of the link I have.

Finding this whole thing fascinating to be honest – I’ve already learnt a few lessons.

1. “Black hat” tools are only “black hat” if you use them as such. They can be used for non-evil purposes too. (Will do a full post on this)
2. In this niche at least, these techniques aren’t going to blast you on to the first page. I can imagine it’s possible with a less competitive niche.

Rank Check as of Feb 14th 2012 (Google UK, only checking top 50 sites)

[keyword 1], No rank
[keyword 2], No rank
[keyword 3], No rank
[keyword 4], 40 - UP 6
[keyword 5], 46 - UP 1
[keyword 6], 36 - DOWN 1
[keyword 7], No rank
[keyword 8], 27 - NO CHANGE

Backlink Profile (provided by Majestic – Fresh Index)
External Backlinks, 871 - UP 236
Referring Domains, 113 - UP 19
Referring IP addresses, 104 - UP 19
Class C Subnets, 96 - UP 16
NoFollow, 711 - UP 194

82% of backlinks are no-follow. Down by 3%.

Traffic Stats (14/2/2012 – 21/2/2012)
17 visits. In summary, “still no traffic”.

You can see previous posts in this series by clicking this handy link.

Activity this week:

• Played with Scrapebox, not done anything with it as of yet
• Article submission (spun article)

Notes – I checked the rank mid-week and noticed I’d virtually disappeared out of the top 50 sites. The site has started to come back as of today though. Seems we’re “dancing” already. Don’t think I’m going to do much this week other than add some more content to the site and maybe ping some of the “do-follow” directory links so that they get noticed.

Also, checked the backlink profile of the #1 site. Spammier than my backlink profile! This shows two things – one, these techniques have worked (they’ve 21k backlinks) and two, people are still using this technique. They’ve A LOT of article site backlinks and as such, I’ve now a list of the sites that their SEO agency promote as the articles all use the author name…

Worth mentioning that 21k links seem to have “exact match” anchor text too.

2nd place has 2400 backlinks, 3rd place has 1900 (although both a higher % of do-follow links than I have currently). 5th has only 515 backlinks to it would appear that for this market, backlinks is a driver in ordering the rankings. Having said that, if it was just a straight backlink race, we’d be higher than we are. Domain age, quality of links etc all playing their part at the moment (which at least offers some reassurance that these methods aren’t the right way!) - the question is can you batter your way over these metrics with sheer backlink volume?

Rank Check as of Feb 14th 2012 (Google UK, only checking top 50 sites)
[keyword 1], No rank
[keyword 2], No rank
[keyword 3], No rank
[keyword 4], 46 – DOWN 23
[keyword 5], 47 – DOWN 25
[keyword 6], 35 – DOWN 13
[keyword 7], No rank
[keyword 8], 27 – DOWN 13

Backlink Profile (provided by Majestic – Fresh Index)
External Backlinks, 635 – UP 310
Referring Domains, 94 – UP 43
Referring IP addresses, 85 – UP 38
Class C Subnets, 80 – UP 39
NoFollow, 537 – UP 281

85% of backlinks are no-follow. Need to reduce that % me thinks.

Traffic Stats (7/2/2012 – 14/2/2012)
27 visits. Up marginally. In summary, “no traffic”.

You can see previous posts in this serious by clicking this handy link.

Activity this week:

• Directory submissions done (still waiting on exact figure)
• Social bookmarking done

Notes – backlinks showing up now, although loads of them are the spammy no-follow blog comments that were purchased. Hopefully the directory listings will help level the “backlink count versus nofollowed count” as they are indexed. Traffic is poor (expected) but seeing the rankings move up is definitely interesting given the backlink profile.

Rank Check as of Feb 7th 2012 (Google UK, only checking top 50 sites)
[keyword 1], No rank
[keyword 2], No rank
[keyword 3], No rank
[keyword 4], 23 – UP 16
[keyword 5], 22 – NEW ENTRY
[keyword 6], 22 – UP 11
[keyword 7], No rank
[keyword 8], 14 – UP 8

Backlink Profile (provided by Majestic – Fresh Index)
External Backlinks, 325 – UP 325
Referring Domains, 51 – UP 51
Referring IP addresses, 47 – UP 47
Class C Subnets, 41 – UP 41
NoFollow, 256 – UP 256 (heh, that’s my comment spam)

Traffic Stats (31/1/2012 – 6/2/2012)
A whole 19 visits in a week. Read them and weep, baby.
(I’ll save you the maths – 2.71 people visit a day)

My test domain is [target keyword][associated word].co.uk – search google for “target keyword associated keyword” and without a single backlink, it’s ranked #9.

Interesting.

Disclaimer: I repeat that I do not endorse any of the following methods for a client site or a domain which you care about. This is a playground site – I intended to “burn” the domain in the name of science (ok, that’s stretching it a little) but I do feel that any good internet marketeer should know this stuff, know where the boundaries are and what the impact is. 

Right, now that’s cleared up, on with the fun!

*****************

Bought a new domain, keyword in URL – [keyword][relatedword].co.uk

Installed WordPress, bought some (well written) content, site meta, headers etc optimised for following keywords (local estimated search traffic in brackets).

[keyword 1], 14,800
[keyword 2], 2,400
[keyword 3], 880

Supplementary Keywords:
[keyword 4], 480
[keyword 5], 390
[keyword 6], 390
[keyword 7], 260
[keyword 8], 260

Main keyword is 50% rated by SEOMoz. (Moderate difficulty, moderately competitive)

Once site was up and running, bought Google +1′s (100)
Once site was up and running, bought comment spam (10,000 links)
(No strategic reason for buying these services – although I was interested in any impact that the +1′s might have)

Comment spam – will take a while to be indexed etc, expecting it to be nowhere near that many in the results.

Site indexed successfully.

Rank Check as of Jan 31st 2012 (Google UK, only checking top 50 sites)
[keyword 1], No rank
[keyword 2], No rank
[keyword 3], No rank
[keyword 4], 39
[keyword 5], No rank
[keyword 6], 33
[keyword 7], No rank
[keyword 8], 22

Traffic Stats: Er, none as of yet.

Some of you may know this story but he was born premature and very nearly never made it but he did and he’s ace squared.

I’m a proud Daddy.

I don’t see how you can be a good inbound marketeer without actually knowing this stuff and finding out the boundaries.

Probably worth mentioning that I don’t use any of this stuff in “real life” and certainly not on any client sites. I just think to be “fully qualified” you need to know some of this stuff – and then choose not to use it.

Predictions? That the biggest difference between “good” and “bad” is scale. I suspect some of the techniques I’m about to use aren’t “bad” at the core but are very naughty/cheeky/whatever-word-you-want when done on the scale this form of marketing advocates.

Time to get my hands dirty.

PS This was posted first on Google+. I’m trying to use it a little more to see if I can find space for it. You’ll find me by clicking this link.

In this case, we had a lot of nofollowed .edu links – it’s easy enough to find old student blogs in the US which have commenting open and in theory gives you a .edu backlink (Lots of US based university and colleges have student blog networks that get forgotten about and leave commenting open).

The link ends up being nofollowed and the blog post gets battered by black hat SEO’s posting links to Britney Spear’s twadge, Viagra or “cheap meds”. In short, it’ll take Google all of about 1 second to work out that the link is worthless. Usually these links are placed by powerful pieces of software which sniff them out. With great power comes great responsibility.

Listen to Spiderman kids, he was right on that one.

It’s not about the link being nofollowed – some of those don’t hurt a backlink profile – but links from a site which is clearly being abused isn’t doing you any good. Have a few of these and it’s probably not doing any harm. Have a few (hundred) thousand and it’s time to clean up.

Here’s what I did

Are you ready? This is rocket scientist stuff this…

• Found the root University page
• Found the right contact details – not always easy but aim to find the webmaster or at least the web faculty contact email
• Write a polite email asking them to remove the link to our site but suggesting that the digital asset is being abused by spammers and doesn’t reflect well on such a well respected seat of learning
• Wait

What happened?

I received an email a week later thanking me for pointing it out to them, thanking me for being so courteous and pointing out that they’d 404′d all of the blogs. Bosh. Links removed.

I did this for a few dodgy links and whilst some have been 403′d rather than 404′d, 90% of the dodgy links that the site had collected have been washed away. All I had to do was ask!

We’ve just got to wait now for our backlink trackers (we use SEOMoz and Majestic) to update their data and we’ll see these fall out of our data reports. Now we can start to get some backlinks from authoritative domains and really help market the site (I’ve a post coming up about how we go about this).

It’s a question I’ve heard a lot from people who are comfortable with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising – PPC is easily trackable, the costs can be easily maintained and managed and a simple “If I spend X on PPC, I get Y back in sales” calculation can be done as all the figures are available.

When undertaking SEO projects, none of the same figures are available. None. Or are they?

As the industry develops, click through rates studies are beginning to appear for the search engine result pages which are more and more accurate. Whilst these may not be true for every keyword or niche market, they do provide a solid enough platform to start trying to calculate what SEO is worth. Again, it’s worth stating again that these are guide figures. Write good meta titles and descriptions and you might find your CTR is better than these guides suggest. You might have the perfect site with perfect meta information and see a lower CTR than these figures suggest. There is fantastic post on this on SEOMoz – you can read it here.

Do you know what a visitor is worth to your site? Do you know what a conversion on your site is worth? If so, we can start to do some thinking…

Where is all this going?

Let’s try this for MadeUp Inc with a conversion rate of 5% and with an average order value of £56.78. We can start to put some of this together.

Let’s say MadeUp Inc wanted to target the keyword “woo hoo” which had 1000 local searches a month (you can find the number of searches a month data in a number of places but we tend to use SEOMoz. Having said that, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is free and does the same thing). Let’s say MadeUp Inc rank in 8th place currently for this keyword.

8th place has a suggested CTR of 1.7% – meaning from a 1000 possible visitors, we get 17 visitors a month. Our conversion rate is 5%, meaning 0.9 visitors of our 17 incoming visits convert on this keyword. That’s worth £51.10 to us per month (£613.22 per year).

We’ve just valued our keyword. We might have some analytics data that supports the assumptions, but we might have some data which suggest CTR is higher or lower than the one suggested. Either way, we’ve now given ourselves a base on which we can amend the calculations. Analytics suggesting that CTR is 10% higher? Simply amend the CTR rate used in the calculation by 10%. Not seeing the expected CTR rate? Adjust downwards accordingly. It’s important to use the data that you already have.

However, for this example, let’s assume that the CTR study is supported by any data we have on the site and that our calculation above is somewhere near.

If we were to undertake some SEO work for the keyword “woo hoo”, we can now work out what the potential ROI is. Being adventurous, we aim for slot number 1.

1st place has an expected CTR of 18.2% – meaning from a 1000 possible visitors, we’d get 182 visitors. Our conversion rate is 5%, meaning 9.1 visitors of our 182 visits convert on this keyword. That’s worth £516.70 to us per month (£6200.40 per year).

Using these numbers, climbing those 7 spots from 8th to 1st is worth an extra £5587.20 a year.

It’s fair to say that I’ve picked the most dramatic example I could (we’ve gone to the top of the rankings!) but still, we’re providing a guide ROI against any budget being allocated to this process.

Is it reliable?
No – the CTR could be wildly different to the studies suggested expectation. The expected visitor data could be out too which could mean we don’t get the amount of traffic being expected. Of course, the opposite is true too – we could get more.

Should it be quoted as legally binding?
Absolutely not. You’d be a fool to do such a thing.

Does this provide some boundaries though of what could be expected – upper and lower limits, that sort of thing?
As long as it’s explained properly (and I mean”properly”), then yes, I think it does.

Summary

I’d always recommend any SEO work should be tested with some PPC first – it’s cheaper than any SEO project and provides a quick insight as to if the keyword you want is worth having. After that, get in to your data. Do you get traffic for that keyword already? How much? Does it convert? At what rate? What is a conversion worth? At this point, we can use some of the data that is available to us – yes, it’s guide data and yes, it shouldn’t be treat as gospel but it can help when deciding if targeting a keyword is worth yours or the clients worthwhile.

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