rocket.jpgI’m not sure if I’ve made it known here at Smart SEO Blog, but I work as a professional blogger for some non-SEO blogs. When I say “professional blogger” in the context of this article, it means the following things:

 

I don’t own all of the blogs that I write for.
If I don’t own the blog, I’m paid to write for it.
Most of these blogs already have an existing audience.

 

Apart from my gigs as a professional blogger, I run some online businesses - with most of them having really competitive keywords. Let’s take the case of Business#1, my oldest-running online service. Here are the stats for the second most competitive keyword for that business (from Nichebot):

Competition: 58,900

KEI: 0.08

Predicted daily count: 123

A year ago, when the website was 3 years old, I got tired of searching amongst 20+ search engine result pages to find my site. Now, I’m on the first page for that keyword. I’m currently the 7th, to be exact. How did I get there?

As a professional blogger, I have access to blogs that have thousands of pageviews in a month. One of the blogs I write for clocks in around 45,000 monthly pageviews. Another one has at least 10,000 pageviews (a conservative estimate). All the main blogs I write for have a PR of at least 4 and above (not that it’s that important an indicator nowadays).

At this point I would like to reiterate that my website for Business#1 wasn’t within the first 20 SERPs for the competitive keyword I wanted. For three whole years, at least.
The only thing I did that made a difference in my rankings was to link to the Business#1 website. Using the said keyword as the anchor text.

And now the site is #7 within the first page of Google’s search results.

Pretty sweet. I can’t believe it took me 3 years to figure that out. (Then again, I wasn’t actively SEO-ing the site, apart from onpage stuff.)

Now the harder part is to get from #7 to #1. Here are some ideas on how I can get there:

  • Get more backlinks using that keyword - not just limited to the blogs I write for.
  • A small-budget ad campaign for increase visibility in the marketplace.

The rankings boost has already increased my number of clients for Business#1. I’d have to say that for an effective SEO campaign, that was pretty easy. It’s actually common sense, but it’s exactly the type of thing that you can overlook.

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