You can make a good living with SEO. Bringing value to people across the world while raking in some, or a lot of money.
The scale of your success depends on the quality of your research, financial & SEO strategy, quality of your execution and consistency along the way.
If you want to make money with SEO personally, or by hitting your online targets, this is the post for you.
For advanced readers (or if you’re just bored), scroll down to skip the parts you’ve already perfected and check out our pro tips.
Research
Any good plan starts with research.
The first questions you have to ask yourself are, “What am I selling?”, ”Who are my customers?” and “Where are my customers”.
Until you answer those questions, you cannot begin your journey.
Pro tip: Research is not about making a specific idea work. It’s about adapting to the market until you find your sweet spot. So be open to changes or suffer a very long and painful journey.
Once you have answered those questions, you need tools to get to work understanding the below:
- Your target keywords.
- Search volume per keyword.
- Difficulty to rank on target keywords.
- Related topics, questions, and long-tail (lower competition) keywords.
- Backlink Velocity & quality.
A few tools which could help you draw these conclusions are Ahrefs, Adwords and Answer the Public.
Start by adding keywords that best describe your line of business, product or service to Google. If your competitors are in the search results, you’re on the right track.
This post won’t cover step by step keyword research.
Check out this post to determine the effort and cost required to rank on the keywords you select.
Web Stats
SEO web traffic that your site converts are what results in your ability to buy Mojitos at the end of the month.
If you’re not thinking about conversion rates, you’re not thinking about making money. If you don’t have these numbers, you can’t talk about ROI. If you don’t plan on getting a return on your investment, you’re just taking a risk and hoping for the best. Don’t take risks when you don’t have to.
Pro tip: Run an Adwords campaign on your target keywords on a mock-up Landing Page of your site, or the real thing.
Collect data like:
- Impressions to clicks.
- Clicks to registrations.
- Registration to purchases.
- Purchases to return purchases.
- Average customer lifetime value.
- etc.
This data tells you a story about the intent searchers have and how effective your product or service is at converting these potential customers.
More importantly, how much these customers are worth, in terms of your margin on sales vs the cost for acquisition.
Reading web stats is like reading tea leaves. The data (or tea leaves) aren’t actually important, the insights you get out of it are.
Collect data that support your hypothesis and implement solutions that help you draw conclusions. Be wary of the rabbit hole of data without a purpose.
Some good places to begin are Google Analytics, Hotjar & Salesforce.
Forecasting Results
This section is where answers to the below will be provided:
- How much traffic can I expect from ranking?
- How much traffic will I convert?
- How much money will that make me?
Remember when we spoke about web stats. Well, this is where that all comes into play.
Assuming that you’ve now built a comprehensive rank prediction strategy, you can correlate your on-and-off page activity at different times of the strategy to determine how much traffic you will get at any point in time.
Pro Tip: Different positions in Google get different amounts of clicks. Check out how many clicks to expect on mobile & desktop at any given rank with this data source, to begin with – https://www.advancedwebranking.com/ctrstudy/
Now you have top of funnel traffic volumes to crunch through your conversion rates. Until you get down to the funds left in your account to buy Mojitos at the end of each month.
Phew, we’re almost there, hang on.
Content Strategies
This can be a whole article in itself, and it will be.
It’s worth a notable mention in this guide, as, without a solid quality content foundation, brand and strategy, all the funds & effort spent on off-page efforts would be wasted.
We’ll cover this in detail in another advanced guide to content.
Consistency
Also worth another notable mention, completing the strategies you set out will win you the battle, but being consistent is what will win the war.
Pro tip: Just like a furnace, when you stop chucking wood, it cools down. Google likes consistency. In the output, trajectory off-page and up to date content on-page. Remember that or see your SEO flames die out.
Final Words
Stay in touch with the fundamentals and build quality first before even attempting competition at this scale.
Quality and focus on the customer are what will win in the long run. Remember the below during this whole process and you’ll be making money through your SEO efforts in no time:
- It’s the web visitor that decides to buy your product or service, not backlinks or content.
- Keep your thumb on the pulse of Google top 10 for changes in momentum & mechanisms.
- Be prepared to adapt constantly.
- Don’t make rushed decisions, data is king. Collect the right data and use it wisely.
- Be open to new technologies like voice search. The single result scenario is creeping in.
SEO is a day to day battle with Google and your competitors.
Keep track of what’s going on and automate to save time where possible. Whether you are scaling up or looking for some reassurance, Gainchanger automates the tedious part of SEO to allow you to scale your results exponentially and focus on what really matters.
Get in touch for a free 5-minute consultation or to start scaling your strategies today.
Gain Changer co-founder Sean Bianco is well-versed in determining market trends. Emphasis is placed on understanding relationships between technical problems and customer impact, resulting in customer-driven products and services.
