How To: Land #1 in Organic Search with WP Landing Pages

Author

Kelly

Published

June 28, 2013

10 Comments

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Ok! Long story short:

I wrote a cookbook on grownup cookies, found a NY agent, and received stellar “tasting” reviews from publishers.
I could not get a publishing contract because I am not on the Food Network (not uncommon apparently).
I decided to use WP to get to the top in organic Google, etc. search because publishers would, no doubt, want to see what potential my “profile” had.
I quickly got to the top of Google thanks to a few simple approaches and a realistic budget. Yes, I did get a contract and Cookies for Grown-Ups came out in December!

Why share this? Here’s why and my purpose: I want to encourage you to do the same with your projects and how I literally accomplished such a neat feat in just 90 days for $100 in domain fees.

Seriously, no joke. Want to learn more and how I did it?

How I Got Started

First I had to prove this concept via my experience with cookies. Yes, cookies. At the time I started working on the cookie project there was serious organic search competition with Martha Stewart and a few other national brands. I purchased a series of domain names related to what I was doing and how I thought bakers might approach their search.

GrownUpCookies.com
SavoryCookies.com
SavoryCookie.com

I also got a few more that offered specific ideas such as FruityCookies, SavouryCookies and others. I purchased the domains for one year with $100 which worked out to 12 domains. After the year I narrowed down to GrownUpCookies.com, SavoryCookies.com and SavoryCookie.com.

My advice is to spend $100 for one year, add WP landing pages, find which ones get the most traction and renew 3-4 only. This way you get the momentum of the bots for the first year as you build traffic to the product’s site. Later, you can reduce the number of the domains as traffic increases. I also added CookiesForGrown-Ups.com because it became the name of the book.

Within 90 days I was on page 1 on Google. I decided to experiment a bit. GrownUpCookies is a WP blog. SavoryCookies is .html. SavoryCookie was a blog and I now have it set as a forwarder.

The Results:

Today, a search for GrownUp Cookies returns 15m results and I’m #1, 2, 3:

Google asks do I mean grown up cookies (with the space)? Okay, at 19m results I’m #1, 2, and the book is #5 at Amazon.

Savory Cookies (which Fancy Food called to say is the next baking trend) with 10m results and I’m #1 and 3 of the 5 photos.

Savory Cookie, which I took down to experiment as a forwarder and will put back up as WP this month is lost. I still return GrownUpCookies.com and SavoryCookies.com on page 1 with a Savory Cookie search.

This shows me, however, that the forwarder was a deal killer; SavoryCookie.com offered high results before the forwarder experiment. In the past I have purchased .net pairs to .com and set the .net as forwarder. In hindsight owning additional domains may keep the competition at bay but they do nothing for ranking/findability.

I Proved the Concept But Could It Be Repeated?

Okay, I guess the long story short turned out to be longer than I intended. Here’s my point-WP is fast to set up and can be used in a production landing page mode. After my “proven” example, I decided on two experiments.

A mildly competitive environment and a highly competitive environment. The first is a community project I’m working on called Shop Artisan to bring attention to local and regional food artisans. I purchased domains

LasVegasArtisanMarket.com
BayAreaArtisanMarket.com
CaliforniaArtisanMarket.com
ColoradoArtisanMarket.com

I also got a few others that represent additional geographic areas. I started posting this week and last week. As of today, with a nominal number of posts:

LasVegasArtisanMarket.com with 1.9m results is #8

BayAreaArtisanMarket.com (I only started posting yesterday) with 2.69m results is #1

CaliforniaArtisanMarket.com with 5.79m results is #11 (last on page 1 in a huge market)

and ColoradoArtisanMarket.com which I haven’t gotten to with a single post yet, with 1.23m results is #2

I’m not thinking I found the WP grail; I do believe this approach motivates small business and individuals to compete with larger budget companies and projects.

Challenge Time! Let’s Do It Again!

This week Dora Crow and I launched Leap99. The product offers mentoring and online learning for creating and optimizing LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn organic search is a much tougher nut than cookies are.

We built nine “production” landing pages that feed into Leap99:

I decided to go for a photo-with-few-words-approach on the landing pages although I realize the bots will want a steady stream of narrative that I can add as support posts. Dora created the Leap99 pages. After the first few days the ranking is nowhere in sight and the pages have been live longer than the artisan market pages. The search results jumped to 651m for LinkedIn Profile. argh.

Well, I’m still not on the Food Network, still teach web development in a community college, and will still find a way to compete in the organic search big leagues. Will be interesting to see how the challenge unveils. In the meantime, for many projects and organizations the $100 in domains production approach creates great strides in findability.

Here’s my production checklist. Assumption is WP is loaded.

Activate Akismet
SEO settings and “Just another WordPress site” (forgot to do this first a couple times and ended up with great ranking and an amateur look to my search result)
Decide if I want the Blog Name to be the same or different from the domain based on search considerations and edit accordingly
Set Permalinks to Post name and lock up .htaccess
Add widget to primary sidebar with descriptive words) because I found several times the bots picked this up immediately even though I set the site description)
Set the favicon (only because small things done quickly don’t have to be remembered)
Change up the footer
Set preliminary categories
Add social icons
Complete profile and set up analytics

I’m assuming everyone reading this post has a similar “list”. If I load 12 blogs and follow my list the set up time is surprisingly short.

When I don’t follow the list I inevitably have one without the footer the way I want it, another with no favicon, and I spend more time backtracking and validating each than it takes to set up correctly.

When I’m setting up multiple blogs my mind wanders to the product, content, and strategy rather than each step in the process. At the end of the day when I have multiple blogs set up and ready for content, I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and start writing my way to page 1.

Ok, your turn. Not that hard, right? Be encouraged!

There are 10 comments

June 28, 2013 #

Eric J

@Kelly Cooper A few questions:

Is this considered totally legit in Google’s eyes?

For your cookies: did you have different content on the different url’s or the same content?

I’m pretty sure LinkedIn is a trademark are you sure you are not going to get in trouble?
June 28, 2013 #

Kelly Cooper

Hi Eric.

It is legit in Google’s eyes, no gimmicks and no gray or black SEO. I create different sites/pages with different content. The way I approach it is to write each addressed to a different persona. This changes my language enough that some of the words are the same and many are not. And I don’t feel like I’m going nuts repeating myself or trying to come up with something different and clever to say. For example, are you a working person baking cookies for peers in the office or a book club member baking for a holiday event? Or, are you a recent career grad creating a LI profile or a mid-career professional planning a career change? Or, are you looking for food artisans in your area of California or Colorado?

Multiple sites discuss one product from different points of view. There is some overlap on product features; however, the primary goal is to connect to different readers. This way I can gauge with analytics both the search parameters of the domain and the resonance of the content to the target.

On LinkedIn, you’re right brand names need to be taken into consideration. In this case we won the LinkedIn DevelopHer Hackday 2012 and were told at that time they hoped we would launch and not drift off. One of the judges, Gina Bianchini founder of Mightybell, has been mentoring us. So, the LinkedIn connection is no surprise to LinkedIn. If at some time they say we’ve overstepped, we’re fine to take domain(s) down. Our primary domain Leap99 doesn’t use the LinkedIn name. In the meantime, we’ll continue to write; next we’ll begin adding posts to each of the landing pages so that fresh content is available once per week and we start to inch our way up.

Hope that helps, happy to comment further. Kelly
- June 28, 2013 #
  
  Eric J
  
  Thanks for the reply! That told me what i wanted to know.
June 30, 2013 #

Stephen Cronin

Not sure where to start with this one.

First, I don’t think success is as easy as this article makes out – although of course that depends on your definition of success.

If you use the Google Keyword Planner tool, it reports that average global monthly searches for “grown up cookies” is too small for them to have a number for. “Cookies for grown ups” on the other hand has 30 searches on average per month (worldwide). The numbers returned by Google are not perfect by any means, but it’s enough to indicate that ranking number 1 for these searches won’t bring a lot of traffic.

So, is success defined as ranking number one for a term that very few people search for? If you can use that to get a book deal, then yes! In most other cases you actually want traffic.

Second, grownupcookies.com is likely to be number one because it has some links from some relatively good sites (such as nj.com, thedailymeal.com and whatscookingamerica.net). Just putting the sites up won’t work if no-one links to you. And yes, links are still one of most important signal even though Google has de-emphasised them somewhat.

Thirdly, savorycookies.com has maybe 200 words on it and 3 links to grownupcookies.com. There’s no quality content on the site itself, it exists purely to send people to the main site. Although the author calls them landing pages, Google has another name for them: Doorway pages. You can read what Google thinks about them here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en

I’ve known people who’ve made a lot of money using this technique, but they were constantly adding new sites as Google de-indexed the old ones. That’s not a path you really want to go down these days (but if you’d done it 10 years ago, you’d be sitting in a mansion now).

Now don’t get me wrong, I think grownupcookies.com is likely to be a success, just not for the reasons given above. It will be a success because there is a related book, which makes it more likely that people will link to the site. It will be a success because it has quality content which will lead to long tail traffic. It will be a success because it has decent on-site SEO.

But I wouldn’t recommend anyone follow the approach outlined above.
June 30, 2013 #

Bradley

As pointed out by Stephen, this technique is not recommended or is SEO a simple process, especially if the search phrase you are targeting has traffic and financial intent.
June 30, 2013 #

Kelly Cooper

I’m not advocating a long term, minimal content, SEO strategy.

I have never had an issue with Google.

I have had phone calls from newspapers and others who saw pages on Google and called for interviews because I was small enough they knew I would be available.

And as I state in the post, I add and change content and offered a few examples that are days and weeks old where I am adding content.

I don’t believe the book propelled the ranking. I believe the ranking brought opportunity. In a niche market, I am looking for a handful of great connections. Were I setting up SEO for a larger product or budget, we all know best practice and Google’s recommendations.

In the end, we agree pages without fresh content are a problem. And in the end maintaining ranking is thanks to reviews such as GoodEats which I never would have attracted without findability. At this point, as I state, I’ll be making cookie page post-experiment changes.
- June 30, 2013 #
  
  Stephen Cronin
  
  Hi Kelly,
  
  Experimenting and finding what works (and then writing about it) is a great thing! And you are clearly doing a lot of things right. It’s just that when I looked into the first example above, I couldn’t personally agree with the method you’d outlined.
  
  I think you would have done just as well with a single domain and the landing pages I looked at were too thin. Even if it worked for you, it probably isn’t a good idea for others to follow this approach blindly. They should at least hear the cons of such an approach.
  
  Anyway, best of luck with your endeavours and your continued experimentation.
June 30, 2013 #

Nate Shivar

Kelly – good luck with your project but as pointed out by Bradley and Stephen above – there are so many things wrong with this post – and I’m very surprised that WP Daily agreed to publish it as it is only going to confuse and mislead so many beginners out there trying to build a sustainable business/blog.

What happened here is that your target terms are very low traffic, low competition terms (that you could’ve ranked for even without spending $100 in domain names) that it looks like Google’s attitude was “well nothing better right now” – let’s serve this one up for a chance.

Golden rule for SEO – if you wouldn’t do it offline, don’t do it online. Anyone reading this post – focus on building 1 solid, informative site instead of using thin doorway pages. Use landing pages on your site, sure, but don’t waste $100 on domain names.
- June 30, 2013 #
  
  John Saddington
  
  We publish differing perspectives on how people achieve things with WordPress – it’s up to the audience to decide if what they read from someone’s experience will work for them.
  - June 30, 2013 #
    
    Stephen Cronin
    
    Great! I’ve got a post on creating numerous low quality WordPress plugins in order to get links to my site. I’ll send it through! 😉 Only joking of course!
    
    I think most of what’s published on WP Daily is great and I’m a fan who reads it every day. I just don’t agree with this post. My worry was that people reading this may follow it blindly, but hopefully they’ll receive a balanced view if they read the comments and can then make up their own minds.