Problem:

My site is ranking, I did my keyword research but nothing is happening, what now?  More often that not, website owners focus so much on getting a site to rank they may forget the original purpose of the site.  If it is to make money, gain notoriety or simply to share ideas you need to focus on what your visitors will do once they arrive at the site.  Ranking for the term(s) will be short lived if you don’t give your visitors something to stick around for.

Just building great content is worthless without considering visitor intent.  Did they arrive on a informational search, are they looking to buy something or are they just having fun?  Whatever the reason you have to optimize your site for that visitor.

Solution:

When finding out what can help there are a number of options available.  First I would look to others in your niche that are successful, what are they doing that is so much better than you?  Could be as simple as the placement of a button or the wording of a call to action or you aren’t using the right keywords.

If you are already ranking for keywords that means the search engines have some level of trust for your site.  Keeping this in mind, try doing some PPC ads with the keywords your competitors are either ranking organically or paying for.  Watch the conversions and this should give you a good idea of what terms you may want to re-optimize for.  Ideally you would do this prior to spending to much time building off page SEO, but getting to your goals should be the focus at this point.

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For the past few months I have been talking about starting a forum for those interested in SEO.  So finally, after finding a platform I believe will work the Minneapolis SEO Forum is here.  Since this is a completely new forum I am open to any and all suggestions, but I think you’ll find quite a few relevant categories to ask your questions in.

I hope you enjoy the format and I look forward to answering your questions (and even asking a few).

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I see a lot questions just like this and my best advice would be to purchase the “exact match” .com, .net or .org for the keyword(s) you are going for.  Ideally the .com TLD would be best.  This in combination with good content, a bit of luck and all the good links you can get will give you an excellent shot at success. Now this is not an option for most people, especially if they are late into the market, because domains like this are already taken or are simply too expensive.  Another option would be to create a killer link strategy and make sure there is some great on site content people want to link to.  If you have the time and money is an object this will be you best bet.

You can start a good link strategy by finding competing sites (for your keywords) that are in the first few pages of the search results.  If the site has very few links but is ranking that is a signal, find out which of those links have the most weight and go for them.  Now getting links is not always an easy task, and many get frustrated when progress is slow.  The good news for those people is linking should not be a one shot deal.  Build your links slowly over time, for example: Week one – 2 links, Week two – 4 links, Week three – 8 links and so on.  If you build links in this manner it not only becomes much more feasible, it is signal to search engines your site is important.

On another note I would recommend before you go through all the effort, using paid search initially to see if the keyword even converts is a must.  Make sure you aren’t putting the cart before the horse.  You could end up ranking for a phrase that is highly informational but does not convert well.

Good luck and feel free to make a comment if you have more questions

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