The last company I was working at had an agent/affiliate program in which one particular agent was dominating the companies online presence. He was serious about online marketing and had hired a seo company. And after dishing out about 1600 a month for a period of years, he was pleased with his website’s success. In many keywords his site was out ranking the parent company, sales were good, and he felt he was getting his moneys worth. That is, untill I was hired by the parent company. What I had found was that the parent company had made muliple huge online mistakes in the past few years. They had used multiple domains pointing to the main site (without 301 redirects), they had redone their website many times without redirecting (causing masive floating content), and had never did basic SE optimisation. To make matters worse, when I started, the parent companies site got penalized by Google and went from page 1 of their brand to page 8 with a loss of over 90% of thier online traffic.
To outrank this site, would be the simplest of tasks. Basically the agent’s SEO company only did a few links (about 1400 over a few years), some minor page optimization, and added a blog in which they occasionally rewrote some article and posted it. This was sufficient until the parent company decided to take their online marketing efforts seriously. So when I got started, I first consolidated all the domains to one and redirected them all with a 301 redirect. Being in the disarray that this site was, it was the perfect opportunity to redesign and restructure the website. A 100% new site was designed and implemented, and with that the floating content from legacy sites was destroyed or redirected to new content. Since this site was penalized, I needed some quick link building, and so I purchased links via Text-Link-Ads.com and http://www.edutextlink.com. Now I don’t recommend this normally, because Google will penalize you if you get caught, but the site was in a bind an I felt it was a risk worth taking. Besides, in the long run, the paid link ads would be replaced with permenant links.
The result of this first effort was tremendous. The sites page rank went from a pagerank of 4 to a pagerank of 7. The site also gained the number 1 page 1 slot for a few terms and even beat out wikipedia in a few spots. The agent who was dominating so much, was blown out of the water. Thankfully we had a good relationship and we started discussing shortfalls of his marketing efforts. You see, not much was really done with the parent site to get it going. In the beginning, the agent had only done a little more SEO work than the parent site, and so it dominated. Then when the parent site did a little bit of seo work, it took off and dominated also.
So what is the takeaway with all this. Well, I find there are thousands and thousands of niches that have sites who have done little or no seo work and rank well. And with a little bit of work, you can completely dominate the niche. Is there more to the amount of work put into the parent site that I did? Certainly, but the basis was that it was all simple common SEO and that was all it took. Once you have gained some possition on the simple stuff, then you can focus on the big fish.
Oh by the way, I was given permission by the parent site to consult the agent. In doing so, I taught him enough to do what he was paying someone else to do himself. His ranking is now in the #2 spot under the parent site and we are developing a plan to take on the keywords un-tapped by the parent site’s marketing efforts.