Early on when I first started SEO, I made it a priority to seek out a mentor. By leveraging a mentor’s experience, your learning curve is significantly shortened as you’re able to make quick advancements while avoiding disastrous pitfalls.
In this article, I’m going to share with you the best piece of SEO advice I’ve ever received from my mentor. If you’re involved in affiliate SEO or lead generation, you need to stop whatever else you’re doing and read this very carefully.
What do most people do when they finally rank a profitable site to #1? Most of the time they move onto a new niche. Huge mistake.
Please write this down…
When you’ve found a successful niche,
deploy 5-10 sites and dominate Page 1.
Reason #1 – Traffic
The #1 spot in the SERPs accounts for less than a third of the overall traffic. Check out this study from Advanced Web Ranking in 2014.
When you combine slots 2-5, they actually get more traffic than the number one spot. Why settle for just 31.24% when you can have 67.6%? You’ve already proven that the website makes you money, now it’s time to double it.
When you deploy and rank multiple sites in the same niche, you’re ensuring that no matter where someone clicks in the SERPs, they’re going to be coming to you.
Here’s a snapshot from ProRanktracker’s new “Term View” showing one of the niches I’m currently deploying into. The top slots are pretty much locked down and there are three more properties coming down the pipeline.
Reason #2 – Insurance
Finding good niche website ideas isn’t an easy task. Finding a great niche is downright rare. So when you’ve found a niche that makes you ${5|10|50|100}k per month, protect your income stream by creating fall-back sites.
As you know, SEO isn’t for the lighthearted. We’re constantly under attack from our competition and algorithm updates. With this type of volatility, the last thing you want to do is get overly attached to one site. In other words, to “put all your eggs in one basket.”
There are ways to recover from penalties, such as double 301 redirects, but they often take time and the success rate isn’t 100%.
The best way to protect yourself is to deploy multiple sites. That way if one gets taken down, your income doesn’t drop to $0.
Reason #3 – Testing
When you deploy multiple sites in a niche, you can afford to deviate from your current tried-and-true ranking strategy and give yourself some space to explore other techniques that have been on your mind.
A key turning point for me in SEO is when I started doing my own testing. Until then I had no choice but to believe what all the gurus (i.e.: marketers) say is working and not-working in SEO.
It’s not uncommon for marketers to preach about some new SEO trick that doesn’t actually work. Coincidentally, their new software will use that same “trick” to get you to page 1 with the push of a button.
Take testing into your own hands and you no longer have to take marketers for their word. Instead of researching the cutting edge, you become the cutting edge.
For the first two sites in a profitable niche, I recommend going with the technique that you definitely know works. For the rest, step outside the box and increase your knowledge base.
In case you’re short on ideas…
Platforms
It’s not just about ranking normal self-hosted websites. Here’s a list of platforms that I’m currently using to dominate page 1. You can use these sites as a social fortress around your money site, send PBN links to them, and they have a solid chance of ranking themselves (see testcase).
- Facebook (Easiest to rank)
- Youtube (Still works with spam)
- Web 2.0s (Tumblr & Rebelmouse in particular)
- Pinterest Boards
Ranking Techniques
There’s 100 different ways to rank sites. Try playing around with the following…
- URLs: EMD vs PMD vs Branded
- White Hat SEO/Content Marketing
- Building Authority
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- Wikipedia Links
- Building a Social Fortress
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- Backlinking Strategies
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- Anchor Text Ratios: aggressive vs conservative
- Pillowing with: PBNs vs Press Releases vs Blog Comments
- Spam/GSA: churn and burn
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- 301 Redirects
- Onsite SEO
- Small mini-sites vs large authority sites
- Satisfying the freshness algorithm
- Frequent updates vs spaced-out updates
- Updating existing pages
- Adding new pages
- Keyword density
- Schema
- Fabricated social signals vs real social signals
- Social bookmarks: yes or no?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
I’m a big fan of CRO and maximizing the value of your ranking properties (comment if you’d like to see a blog post on the subject).
- SEO Title Tags – Branded vs Click bait.
- Meta descriptions – Try click bait descriptions that cut off where you want them to. Example: “We provide honest reviews on the top 5 skin creams available in today’s market. Find out if you qualify for a free…”. The user will read this and think “Free what? I have to know!”
- Different themes
- Heatmap Testing – I’m a huge fan of the free WP plugin: Heatmaps
- Call-to-Actions (CTA) – Try Optimizely. You won’t regret it.
If there’s only one thing that you’ve learned from my blog, I hope it’s this topic. Dominating page 1 and diversifying your income stream is hands-down the best advice I’ve ever received and I’m happy to be passing it off to you.
Thanks Matt. You’re absolutely right, we have to dominate our niches with different sites.
Thanks for your seo advice and looking forward for CRO blog post
Great article. Thanks for that Matt,
Never thought about creating multiple niche sites within the same niche..
I’ll definitely mix it up between sites and give it a try..
Cheers
Solid article again Matt.
Question on parasite rankings. I’ve had some success with YT and FB rankings but struggle to get onto page 1 for the bigger terms. Mainly used GSA for this to get into the 20-30s. Do you recommend getting Sape + Relevant PBNs at parasite to bump it over the line?
Interested to hear your thoughts.
Tom.
Hey Tom,
For YT, I use GSA spam initially. Then if I need a bit of extra push, I’ll hit it with PBNs.
For FB, I use strictly PBN combined with a lot of onpage activity.
I don’t recommend SAPE in-general for ethical reasons.
Really nice article Matt, it was a great read. And the overall point it fantastic.
Matt, great article. Something that I will put into practice. I want 67% of the traffic
Keep it up
CR
Thanks for the great advice Matt (and your mentor). I have been thinking about starting my own testing recently, but am not too sure where to start. Would love to see a post about that.
The key to good testing is to establish a solid control group and an experimental group where only one varible is changed. Easier said than done since there’s about a billion variables constantly fluctuating when it comes to ranking algorithms.
Matt,
it was a great to read and so much details about pbn!
lots of info here , thanks> need to find the time to read all your posts
Hello Matt,
Having multiple sites on one niche seems to be a good idea though, I’ve never heard of such before.
If you could rank all of the sites on Google then, you will not be afraid of any uncertainty as you mentioned here, this is something i might consider trying.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Matt, great info. I’d love to read a post about CRO.
Matt,
This seems like a good and effective platforms,Thanks for this great tips, i appreciate it.
Nathan
Matt, I’m a big fan of ranking YT videos on Page 1 of Google as you can make great commissions when targeting the right keywords (like product names)
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Since I read that your main strategy with YT rankings is using Spam first and then (if needed) use PBN links, I wanted to ask you some follow-up questions:
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1) When you say to use Spam… Like “how much” of it?? 1k links, 10k links or even more than that?
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2) Say my main three keywords are: “product name”, “product name review” and “product name side effects”… Which anchor text distribution to use with the Spam links?? Do all my Spam links need to be focused on these three keywords only?
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3) How long do you personally wait in order to see results from Spam links? Weeks, a month?
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4) Say there are other 2 videos ranking on Google for your keyword but they have 0 links and from non-authority accounts. Do you worry about the “black sheep” effect here? (for videos) or do you Spam the video either way to surpass these current ranking videos?
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Thank you!
It’s been a while since I used spam on Youtube. These days I’m going with high volume embeds. They can be on PBN inner pages as well.
Thanks for the great article. Do you use social fortress do drive traffic to the money site? Or you make them
As stand alone money site in itself?
Every once in a while the Facebook and/or Twitter will rank, so yeah, they have the potential to drive traffic.
thanks matt
this gives me idea how to do seo in my niche
Matt, is it an issue if the sites you are trying to rank for the same keywords, are hosted on the same server (VPS in my case) or have the domains registered at the same registrar?
The concern is very tin hat, but if it were me, I’d mix it up just for peace of mind.
Have you ever covered this anywhere? How do you make sure to keep all of your websites separate and avoiding getting busted?
All my money sites are disconnected in every aspect, so it’s never been a concern of mine.
Another great SEO info, best regards!
Maurizio
Do you send social signals to a facebook page or twitter page? Just wondering what you do differently for a facebook URL that you are trying to rank, do you use a press release for it?
Or,
Do you just drip feed PBNs to it?
I’ve been thinking about this question for a while because doesn’t it look unnatural for social signals to be going to a facebook page or a press release?
I run PPC campaigns to grow facebook groups and hit them with a few PBNs.
Tanks very much for your article Matt, i discover your blog with your article on expired domain test, and it’s also excellent.
I bookmark your blog. Excellent seo advices.
Happy to help.
Hey mat, gold nuggets here. A little bit off topic but I thought there’s no better person to ask than you.
So, I want to work on a niche site, however, most of the keywords on the SERPS are dominated by Facebook, Twitter, quora, reddit etc. I’ve looked up the keyword via ahrefs and keyword revealer and they seem easy to rank for.
But my fear is that it will be an uphill battle to outrank these authority sites considering how unreliable keyword tools metrics can be.
I don’t know unless I look at the actual SERP.