how to get natural traffic from google in under 3 days
After deciding to finally get my new blog up and running last week, just a couple months after my 10 year anniversary of working in the online world, I thought it would be cool to let everyone know how I started getting natural google traffic to this site just 3 days after the launch of the site.
I always say that whenever someone that claims to be an SEO guru ‘promises’ or ‘guarantees’ they can deliver for you in the world of SEO, you should be skeptical. That being said, let’s take a look at the steps I took when starting this site to ensure I started down a path to building a firm foundation.
1. Settle on your domain – I am big fan or deferring decisions until the last second possible, but in the case of a domain, it’s best to make a good decision from the start. Whatever your niche – make sure you grab a domain that you’ll be happy with – after all, you’re going to be spending a great amount of time and effort to make your site great, right?
I went with Swansonager.com – thought that would be a memorable name for me since it was a nickname I had at one point growing up
2. Technology – What platform are you going to build your site on? Wordpress? Joomla? Rails? Asp.net? It doesn’t matter 100%, but you should look at the different languages, what they have to offer as far as community support goes, and how that can best fit into your strategy for building out your business.
For me, this was an easy one – Wordpress. Wordpress has a ton of support and it’s been only getting better since Matt started the project a few years back. Themes, plugins, you name it and want to do it online – Wordpress has the support for it – hands down.
3. Content for your site – this is a key issue. Most folks want the easy way out here – doing things that are blackhat or look phishy to the search engines is definitely no-no. Just ask Matt Cutts – his summary of how BMW .de did something not so good back in 2006 is always a reminder to me that we should be building things to make the best user experience and the best content for our users – not just doing things for SEO reasons. 99% of the time when you try and do things that are meant to game the system, you lose. Seth has a great article on “The spirit of the game” that I suggest you read if you haven’t already.
4. Process of launching – to make this easy, I’ll just sum up what I did to prepare for the launch of swansonager in addition to how long it took me to get things done (approximately).
| Action | Time to complete |
| purchase domain | (5 min) |
| setup hosting | (5 min) |
| install wordpress | (10 min) |
| find one of the 100 Excellent Wordpress Themes available for free | (10 min) |
| customize the theme slightly | (15 min) |
| download a couple plugins for wordpress | (10 min) |
| submit my Google Sitemap | (5 min) |
| get my Google Analytics code setup for swansonager.com | (5 min) |
| customize the theme slightly | (15 min) |
| verify swansonager.com with Google’s Webmaster Tools | (5 min) |
| setup my feedburner code | (5 min) |
| add a twitter follow me button | (10 min) |
| Total Development Time: | ~100 Minutes |
This was my basic process, but you get the picture. In just over 100 minutes, I had put together the basics for what I needed to get my site up and running and all in a very lean fashion for deploying software.
What comes next is content. Yep, that’s it from a setup perspective – so in just over 100 minutes or over an hour and a half, I’m ready to go.
So I start writing a couple blog posts, and then my long lost friend Googlebot pays me a visit, thanks GoogleBot, I had missed you. The post I am going to share is the one from yesterday, just 3 days after my blog launched. I wrote about a funny ad in the Sunday AJC paper that featured steaks for a dollar.
Within a few hours of submitting that post to Swansonager.com, I’m ranking for the keywords dollar tree steak on page 2 of Google for this search term. Pretty cool, eh? Now before you jump in and say – hey! “dollar tree steaks” isn’t anywhere near a competitive keyword phrase to rank for, I already know that 
This example was really just to illustrate that, given your niche, it’s entirely possible to rank for long tail, niche specific keywords in Google very quickly (in less than 3 days in this case for a brand new domain/site), despite what rumors you might hear.
Swansonager Ranking for Dollar Tree Steaks
Results from the lone user that found swansonager.com searching for Dollar Tree Steaks:
Natural Search Traffic to Swansonager.com
Thanks, Matt! Great post! As for those of us who use blogger, do you have any suggestions regarding it specifically? Or if not, is it a good idea to switch over to Wordpress?
Definitely Alison, excellent point for sure… I’d say off the top of my head, the biggest thing that comes to mind regarding blogger is your out point. Meaning if you plan to grow you business and then are planning to sell at some point, I’d definitely say you are better off on a standalone install of Wordpress rather than running under the x.blogspot.com architecture.
All the weight you are building for your site is behind the blogspot domain to some degree and that real estate/traffic is way more valuable when it’s on your own domain/url directly.
That being said, there are ways to migrate from blogger to wordpress and also some tips if you are going to stay on Blogspot. I’ll do a special post dedicated just to that topic later this week.
Great article with good references and a ‘you can do it’ attitude.
Can you write one on how to turn this newbie site into real cash? For instance, how much would you expect the dollar steaks traffic to bring you in ad revenue if you had 100 unique visitors, 1k, 2k etc ? Could you extrapolate that and give some advertising stream advise beyond google adwords?
Sure thing. As far as turning something like this into real cash – beyond Adsense, there are several ways. I’d look at building out a portal all about steaks. The maybe take that a step further into a Geography based site that had maybe the best steak places in small towns or large areas across the US, etc. You could probably tap into an API from Yelp or someone with customer reviews (all making sure you’re under their TOS of course) and populate the local steak places on the site.
Once you establish some natural traffic, you might be ready to start targeting local restaurants that might want to get targeted local traffic via your steak review portal. Josh has a great read on the power of niche social networks and while a steak review engine might not be worthy of a social network build out, there might be something there for sure.
As far as the 100 UVs v 1K UVs, etc goes, CPM Rates are through the floor right now and not worth much, but I’d go direct – build your business of the best place to review steaks in local markets – then target local mom and pop restaurants that don’t have a ton of money to be used for marketing (on things like PPC) and offer then something they can’t refuse – give them prime placement for their city or local metro area.
Just some quick thoughts off the top of my head…
[...] this week, Alison commented on my post about how to get natural traffic from google in under 3 days and posed this question: Thanks, Matt! Great post! As for those of us who use blogger, do you have [...]
Interesting post, keep the good stuff coming, good content appreciated!