Introducing Our Live SEO Case Study

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show episode 84 of the SEO show. I'm Michael Costin and I'm joined by Arthur Fabik. Hello. How are you going? Good. That's good to hear. Ready to talk SEO with you. We're talking SEO as always. The name is on the lid, as they say. We've got something pretty cool. We've got a little bit of an initiative, a little bit of a strategic initiative that we're rolling out on the SEO show. A little project. Little project. We are going to build a website.

ARTHUR: Do we have a, wait, do we have a name for this little series?

MICHAEL: We'll come up with something. Live case study. Okay. That's a bit boring. We'll workshop that. And by the next episode for this, we'll come back to you. We're going to build a website. We're going to take it from nowhere, from scratch, from an idea. At the moment, it's an idea. It doesn't exist. We're going to take it, build it, do SEO, get traffic to it. Hopefully, hopefully that's the plan and take you along for the ride and show you, well, explain to you everything we've done and why so that you can follow along and learn and hopefully enjoy it.

ARTHUR: And we haven't started yet. So it's going to be a hundred percent live. This is hopefully going to keep us accountable. So we actually do it. Imagine we can't release this and not do it.

MICHAEL: So yeah. Cause like what we could have done is done this, recorded it all over many months. And then once we knew it was going to work, release it all. Yeah. But that is not the case. We won't reveal the domain on this episode. We will in the next, but you'll see when it was registered. You can do a who is on it and see when it was registered, but we're doing it live. We're hoping that it works. We are staking our reputations, our impeccable reputations around here. Don't say that. So don't say that. If it doesn't work, it's fault. I've got nothing to do with it if it doesn't work, but if it works, it will work.

ARTHUR: Yep. I'm very confident. It's going to work.

MICHAEL: The reason why confident, why are we confident?

ARTHUR: Because we're good at SEO. Okay.

MICHAEL: Cool. Well, let's explain. We're going to explain what the niche is, why we picked it, what some monetization angles might be for the site. Now we may or may not monetize it, but at least we'll explain what those angles are, what the plan is, and then what's next. So that's a pretty good structure for explaining what the project is. So the niche, how did we navigate this niche and come up with the topic? How did we? Yeah, well, basically.

ARTHUR: I'll let you explain that one.

MICHAEL: We've gone with the niche of car competitions slash giveaways. Now, how did we pick it? Well, there's a lot of car competitions around at the moment. You would see them online a lot, a lot.

ARTHUR: So on Instagram, Facebook.

MICHAEL: Yep. And, um, we thought, well, what happens with SEO with people searching Google are people searching Google for this stuff? did a little bit of research and saw that they are, not only are they searching for it, but the niche is pretty wide open. It's, there's a few affiliate sites already in the space, but the competition's not that strong. And when we're doing a live case study to stop it from dragging on for months and months and months, we need to pick something that is easy enough to rank for, but also has, I guess, search volume and that commercial angle to it. And we thought this one was a good one. You know, we're not trying to rank for best lawyer, Sydney, no divorce lawyer, Sydney, something like that.

ARTHUR: Not to say this is going to be easy. True. It's still going to be a challenge, but yeah, I think we're both interested in cars as well. So very true. It makes it a lot easier to work on something we have an interest in.

MICHAEL: Yeah. If it was like bumblebee harvesting, probably not going to be that interested in it.

ARTHUR: You always somehow managed to talk about bee harvesting. Do I? I swear you've mentioned honey. I don't know. Something, something weird.

MICHAEL: Silk. Silk harvesting. Yes. We went with silk. Don't know why that's where my mind goes. Insects? Yeah. Like surely, you know, from being an SEO and explaining SEO to people, you'd pick stuff. That's a bit more God knows who knows, but let's move on. Why did we pick it? As we said, decent search volume with relatively low competition is the main reason. So to give you an example, the keyword, when a car is searched 1300 times a month, it has a keyword difficulty score of six.

ARTHUR: It's probably more than that.

MICHAEL: It would be searched way more than that.

ARTHUR: More because yeah, I always go off keyword planner because ahrefs is it's all right, but I find the numbers and keyword planner are always higher.

MICHAEL: Yep. And look. I think for ease, we've gone with Ahrefs. Yep. You can just be, when you see that there's load keyword difficulty scores and decent volume, you can expect that the real volume, the real opportunity is much bigger because there's all sorts of variations and because Ahrefs is just estimating. Are you sure it's six Winnicar? Yep. 6kd.

ARTHUR: Okay.

MICHAEL: That's low. So then Winnicar Australia, 500 searches a month. They've got a 5kd on that one. Win a car competition, 200 with a 5KD car lottery. Australia is no car raffle. Australia is the most competitive at 25 KD.

ARTHUR: So that's starting to get up there, but it's surprising that it's more competitive than win a car. Yeah. Don't you think? It is surprising. I would think when a car would be more competitive and not harder to rank.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Hmm. You would think so, but according to Ahrefs it's not. What I would say is that generally across the board here, we're looking at, I would say there would be tens of thousands of searches a month in this niche of car competitions, giveaways, raffle, all that stuff. Yep. And the keyword difficulty is not that, you know, the KD scores low. And when you go on Google and search these keywords and you look at the search results, Let's do it actually. So let's go with Winacar because that is the highest searched keyword. Chuck Ahrefs on. And so the site first has a DR of 13. They have 1200 referring domains. So that's a US site.

ARTHUR: What's the site?

MICHAEL: Let me, um, you know what, let me just have a look here. My webs, my Google has been thinking that I'm in Washington lately out of nowhere.

ARTHUR: So I just said car raffle Australia. The first site is, can we name it or are we not naming sites?

MICHAEL: No, whatever. Anyone can search this stuff.

ARTHUR: Okay, cool. We got competitions and the DR is five.

MICHAEL: Yeah. 78 referring domains. Yeah. Very low. Car competitions.com.au DR 16, 11 referring domains. Yourtown.com.au. Yeah. What's that?

ARTHUR: I don't know.

MICHAEL: The competitions.com.au DR30 with referring domains, 1200. So that one is like a more generic catch all site targeting, not just cars, but, um, when a home iPads, whatever, like all those different categories that you could go with. The competitions.com.au DR9 referring domains, 2,900. It sounds like they've had a lot of spammy links built, but what we're hearing here is or seeing is a pretty not that competitive of a search result. And we're going to come in with, um, of a website that is focused around cars so that, you know, there's really only a couple, there's only one actually.

ARTHUR: Well, look, there's this site called Car Hub Australia, which is sixth with a DR of 0.7. I like those numbers. Search traffic is 2.5 thousand. Yeah.

MICHAEL: That's crazy. Yep. So we are pretty happy with our niche.

ARTHUR: Are we not very happy? Let's talk. Hopefully we'll see what happens over the next couple of weeks slash months.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So it's going to be months. We won't be doing an episode every week on this. It will be. We'll cover what we're doing soon, but let's move into monetization because you're going to spend time building a site. We're doing it for a case study, but people are not going to invest time in something unless it generates them a return normally. So in this space, if you were to monetize it, first and easiest would be chuck some AdSense on them. If you're getting tens of thousands visits a month, you might get a decent, uh, I guess, payout from the ads on the site. That's the easiest. The next way would be running affiliate offers. So we did a quick look on commission factory and there are quite a few different, um, giveaway companies or lottery brands in the space that are running affiliate offers. So we can see that they're paying anywhere from 10 to 30%. Okay. And, um, they're saying on their pages that the average order value can be $70 or more. So a 25% payout on a $70 average order value is $18 per customer referred. which is pretty good. Decent. If you're getting tens of thousands of visits and it actually converts. So, um, it might be that you'd run a combination of AdSense and affiliate on a site like this. I'm not expecting that it would make you set for life, but it would be, it should sit there and earn passive income.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You'd hope so with that amount of traffic, if we can get it when we get it, when we get it, when we get it.

MICHAEL: So what's the plan after, how are we going to do this?

ARTHUR: Um, so we're going to start from scratch basically. So we we've bought the domain registered, but now we need to build a website. So we opted to use WordPress as the CMS. Um, the reason being is that most listeners will probably probably be using WordPress or we would recommend for them to use WordPress. So it makes sense for us to kind of run through that. platform. From there, we'll find a theme that's appropriate for a competition site, and then a page builder, probably Elementor, and then start building out the site. We'll do some link building. So we'll start off with foundation links, which we've spoken about on the show numerous times. So things like directories, social profiles, web 2.0. And then from there we'll see how I guess the site performs.

MICHAEL: Our suspicion is it will start ranking just off that, like the content which we'll cover in a second, but these links probably won't need to be too over the top with authority links.

ARTHUR: No, because like I said, with the DR of that site had a DR of 0.7 and it was first page. You probably could get away without any authority links.

MICHAEL: Time will tell.

ARTHUR: We probably will do some authority link building though anyway, eventually in time.

MICHAEL: So the general plan will be get the site built, all the content up, blast out the foundation links, sit, see how it goes, then start dripping out some authority links to really juice it up if we need to. Content. content.

ARTHUR: So obviously we'll build out the homepage targeting all the keywords Michael mentioned earlier. So when a car car competition, car raffle Australia, then we'll start branching out into different, um, specific giveaways. So. There's other brands like, what's this one matter?

MICHAEL: I think it's Marta, your town PCYC. So the brands, but then each of them would do individual giveaways. So it might be like winner Tesla or something. So yeah, we'd have Marta Tesla giveaway as a page. You can have the Marta page. It's like a category page. I've never heard of them before. We don't even know if we're saying that word right.

ARTHUR: Your town. Yeah. And then we'll build out pages for different car manufacturers that people might be searching for. So when a Mercedes, when a Tesla, when a BMW and try to capture traffic by building those pages out as well.

MICHAEL: Yep. Then the other thing we were thinking is we could create pages for what we're calling adjacent brands or interests. Things like today show competition or today FM competition have a lot of search volume because they're always running giveaways competitions. People might be searching that if you can rank and get some visibility, people will come through to this site and then they might be interested in what it has to offer. Click on the affiliate links or, you know, serve up an ad impression and get a bit of value out of that traffic too. So. Based on our cursory keyword research, they're the general areas. And really, I don't really think there's going to be too much else coming out of it. You know, as we start building.

ARTHUR: No, it is what it is. I mean, if there is, we'll let you know.

MICHAEL: True. Well, that's a good segue into what's next. How are we going to keep you guys updated? We don't really want to do an episode where we're explaining, here we are typing keywords into SurferSEA, blah, blah, blah. So what we're going to do is publish check-in episodes over the coming months, where we recap the work that we've done in that previous period. So the results, any interesting findings, you know, basically what we've done and why. We will cover things like the host we went with, if we do speed optimization, what our speed was beforehand, what we did, what the speed was after. Plugins we used. Yeah, and why. Content creation as well. We're actually going to use a bunch of well-known SEO content creation platforms or vendors in the space. Give them all the same piece of content and we'll do an episode where we assess the quality of that content that's come back. So that'll be a good episode because there are quite a few vendors in the space and we'll use one piece of content to compare them all and give you our honest feedback because we don't have any, I guess, violations or bias. So that'll be interesting. So we're going to be able to get a bunch of different interesting episodes out of this that might stand alone on their own, as well as these check-in episodes that show you what we're doing and why and how it's all been going. I'm excited. Me too. I think I'm excited. Officially. You look excited. I'm also apprehensive. It's excitement mixed with apprehension. Why apprehensive? We've got to deliver. We've just got to deliver now.

ARTHUR: We will deliver.

MICHAEL: We can't have an SEO showcase study that doesn't work. We'll definitely deliver. So we won't share the domain now, but we will be sharing it in the next update because we've got to build this site out. You know, we don't want you looking at a domain registrar holding page. Yeah. So give us a couple of weeks. Yeah. We'll do some other episodes in the meantime. And then one day, bang, an update will drop and, um, hopefully it'll be a big one. So that's the show. That's the show today. Until next episode, we will be SEOing. Happy SEOing to you. See ya.

INTRO: Bye. Thanks for listening to the SEO show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.