How a Rookie Got a Top Google Ranking: The Holy Grail - Part 1
A mere two months ago I launched my Craigslist Notifier App without much fanfare.
See I am lean startup disciple so I used the first two months to get feedback from our users on how our service could delight them. It’s still a work in progress.. for that matter I guess it will always be.
Fast forward to the early morning hours of 12.10.12 as I was getting ready for bed I was checking to see why I was getting a consistent amount of signups for the last two days.
So I googled “craigslist alerts” to see if there had been any changes. For the past month or so.. I had been holding steady at the top of the second page. During that time I implemented a well rounded content and link-building strategy.
This was a strong keyword to rank for as you can see below.
I knew that if I stayed consistent and disciplined I would get on the first page of the Big G eventually. As a point of reference I owe much of my success to Jon Cooper's PHENOMENAL Link Building Course! (Go buy this course now!)
Here is the thing though.. The way that I developed an inbound marketing strategy is I acted like Google didn’t exist. Hear me out, I knew from that keyword research that a good amount of people were searching for a problem that I could solve.
So my goal was to go to them and present my solution to their problem. Here are the key points that helped me get a top search ranking in under three months. (Thanks to what appears to be algorithm update from Google).
- Past
- Present
- Future
- The Forum Rubric Hack - I love the dead simple methodology behind this. “Disregard Rankings Build Links for Traffic” - The goal is to find forum posts on you’re subject and engage quickly and make sure that it has potential to reach a decent size audience. It’s also very important to add value to the conversation. I found using Google Alerts really helped out in staying on top things. This tactic has been very effective not only in building links but driving highly qualified leads. Hat Tip to Don Rhoades for this masterpiece!
- Twitter search: I comb Twitter search once a day and find relevant tweets that I can interact with. This is a good sniper technique and has been effective in driving traffic but is not easy to scale while still being personable.
- Personal Blog: On Dec 1, I started blogging about my experiences building Cl Alerts. Topics have ranged from how I went from 0-20,000 email alerts sent in two months to link building to creating a demo video for $5 and finding early evangelists. In seven days I had over 3000 visits and made it to the front of page of HackerNews, inbound.org, StartupRev and PandaWhale I submitted all posts to Reddit, Buzzfeed,Digg and Stumbleupon. This was by far the best driver of traffic and what I think was mostly responsible for my meteoric rise of the search rankings. The best part was the content creation was based on what I have been learning throughout the past two months.
- White Hat Comment Hack: It’s super simple and it drives traffic.
Stay tuned for part two where I discuss how video played an important role in my search rankings and a how I am using a service called Spinnakr to help build traffic.
(Main Photo: Roy Razanski)
