We always knew that this would be a slow process that would take a few month to bear any fruit, whether that be money or just a decent Google search ranking. We have read the excellent book Outsmarting Google: SEO Secrets to Winning New Business book and followed, albeit in a wiggly line, what the book has told us. Actually, we are only up to about chapter 3 in terms of implementing the strategies of the book, but this is not because we are slow workers or lazy, it is because we feel we have advanced to a suitable level for this moment in time, and are allowing our website to age (domain age) so that we can fully assess the benefits of the different stages of optimising the website for Google Search Rankings.

What we have done so far on our Niche site experiment is add content around 3 main keywords (indoor skiing, ski club, ski scotland) that we identified as having a good amount of UK search traffic. We decided to add some social interactions to the website, and although not mentioned too much in the Outsmarting Google: SEO Secrets to Winning New Business book we thought it would be nice to learn these skills as we will certainly be using them on future projects.

We have set up Snow Pursuits Twitter, Facebook, and
Google+ pages and linked to the relevant sources so that we can benefit from them. Perhaps the most beneficial of these in the future is Google+, and we have linked to the website and to our personal profiles so that we are now starting to get an author image appearing next to certain posts in the Google Search results. For example click here to see the Google Search results which includes one of our Snow Pursuits pages.

Along with the content we have made sure that we include all the vital SEO data within our posts and pages to improve our chances of ranking well in Google. These are the keywords within the text, the page title and the page description. The two other areas that are important for Google Search Rankings are backlinks to your site and finally website age. You can not do much about website age apart from being patient, which is actually harder than it sounds, because when you implement something on your site you have to wait weeks, and even months to see a result. We are hoping that within the next month or two we will see a major boost in our search results because our website will have reached an age of between 4 and 6 months.

So, backlinks…. These are thought to be one of the most important factors when it comes to Search Rankings, because Google (and other search engines) see them as votes for your site, so the more votes the better your site will be viewed by Google. Backlinks are good, but backlinks from big well established websites are great. We have amassed close to 30 backlinks at the time of writing, but we are missing a big hitter in terms of web presence. That said we are progressing nicely for the age of our website, we are ranking about page 2/3 for 2 of our target keywords, and are currently pulling in 20/40 visitors a day.

We have placed Google Adsense on our site as a test as to see if we could make any money this way. We have just started to see some clicks on these Google Adverts, and this month we are creeping up towards £5. Not a fortune, but for us it is a good proof of concept. We have not optimised for conversions or placed the adverts in clever positions, so any number of clicks is seen as a positive result. So for now we wait, assume more backlinks, and possibly add more content. Stay tuned for more updates and future projects which are about to commence.

In our pursuit of knowledge the CTOP team headed to Leeds for the recent Web Fuelled Business conference. We were drawn to this conference because it ticked a lot of the boxes on the list of our present goals here at CTOP. As mentioned in a previous post our immediate aim is to develop a niche website and drive traffic to it through outlets such as search engines and social media. Check this niche winter sports website out.

The event was organised by Doug Richard (who rose to fame on BBC’s Dragons Den) and his School for Startups organisation, and the topics open for discussion were: How to get ranked in Google, selling online, selling into key marketplaces, Google Adwords, and using social media. While CTOP is not looking into selling physical products online at the present time, understanding this area in more detail is necessary for the future, but the Google ranking and Social media presentations were right on the money in terms of what we are trying to achieve right now. The event was hosted in by Doug Richard, and it is fair to say he is a very experienced and successful business person, and you could tell he knew his stuff when he spoke. The audience was full of individuals who either ran their own small companies or were looking to start their own business soon, and the split was approximately 50:50 men and women.

The sessions started with Doug Richard interacting with the audience, asking them to summarise their business in one sentence, or a maximum of two. This business summary should include what your business does, who their customer is, and how it serves their customer. He asked for a volunteer from the keen business orientated audience, and they did not let Doug down, with many arms raised when he asked for someone to begin describing their business. Without going into too much detail most people who spoke did an average job at summarising their business, but one thing that struck me was the extreme lack of imagination of the other participants. Maybe it is because myself and my business partner who were attending the Web Fuelled Business conference in Leeds have our minds full of novel and exciting business plans and models, business ideas that look to move things forward and do things a little bit different from the norm. The participating audience at this business conference were saying things like “I make bespoke jewellery”, or “I am a web designer”, there were no new business ideas, but thinking back, maybe this conference was more for small, normal businesses rather than the kinds of businesses that are really looking to innovate, which in the end of the day is what we at CTOP are looking to do.

This first audience participation was aimed at breaking the ice and making people think more clearly about their business and their business plan. The first real session involved Doug Richard going into detail about Google and how to setup your website to rank better in Google and how to display your information in the Google search results. This was just an introduction to the area, and there are follow-up work classes online (as a cost). This Google discussion was interesting and made us thing a little more about our business plans, but in the most the best thing about this Google ranking presentation by Doug Richard was that it reassured us that CTOP was doing the correct things to have the best chance of rising and staying at the top of the search engines for a given set of target search keywords.

At this business conference there was one person in the audience who worked for the government and was in charge of overseeing the development of this specific departments search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts. This lady informed us that her department was paying a company over £2000 a month to improve their website and get it ranking better in Google and ultimately get more traffic to the site. This lady then admitted she knew nothing about this area and in meetings this external company they told her stuff that she didn’t understand, and if she was being honest “they could have told her anything”. As this story unfolded she admitted that they have been pursuing this line for over 1 and a half years, thus spending over £30k on SEO and were actually seeing less traffic to their website than when they started. This made me think that we at CTOP were definitely going about our business in the right way, funding all aspects ourselves and learning the basics (and even more advanced tactics) in all important areas such as SEO and web design. This not only ensures we keep a tight hold of our expenditure but also when we outsource in the future we know we are not being ripped off. Unfortunately the government department that this lady worked for do not value their (or should I say our) money as highly and are happy to put someone in charge who admits herself knows nothing about search, and then hire a company to sort out their search problems who appear to be taking advantage as they know they are onto an good thing.

Anyway, after that tangent… we then had a speaker who once worked for Amazon and clearly knew his stuff about eCommerce. He spoke about how to sell online and setup an eCommerce marketplace simply and most importantly for free. Understandably he spoke about Amazon and how to sell on the Amazon Marketplace, and also about other free websites on which you can setup and sell items for free. This was very interesting and something we at CTOP will likely consider later, but at the present time our business strategy does not focus on eCommerce so I will not speak too much about this.

Unfortunately the social media discussions did not materialise, most likely due to time restrictions. I was a little annoyed because this was one of the main areas I really wanted to hear more about, but there is online material that is supplied by the Web Fuelled Business team so I will definitely check this out, and report back here later if there are any particularly useful bits of information. All in all this conference was pretty good and I recommend any of you who are interested in having a web presence for your business or looking to start a business soon to attend if it happens again, which apparently is should. The UK government have a vested interest in getting new businesses starting and growing, so they sponsored this event and if it proveed successful, which I think it did, it will happen again.

We are currently applying some of the lessons we learnt to our niche UK Skiing and Winter Sports website, and although the process is slow, the website is slowly gaining credibility on the web and receiving more attention. We have taken a major step to advance things and we are also setting up a foundation for our future enterprises, and we will discuss this in an upcoming post here on CTOP.

Keep working hard on whatever you are doing

Best wishes from the CTOP team.

As part of our strategy to grow our business organically we are looking to generate a cash flow early. To do this we are developing a content based website focused on generating traffic from search engines, mainly Google in the first instance. We then aim to utilise conversion techniques to turn some of these visitors into revenue.

The niche website that we are developing is aimed around winter and snow sports in the UK. Content will be added all the time, but at present the core content is based on indoor skiing, ski clubs, and ski Scotland. The site is still in its early stages of development but if you are interested in indoor skiing and snowboarding, finding a ski club near you, or want to know more about the Ski Scotland resorts check out our new website Snow Pursuits.

Finding a host

The first issue we faced when starting on this road to niche greatness was to find a suitable host.  Our initial choice godaddy was appealing as they offered a uk helpline number, which we later found out diverted all calls to America anyway.  They were fine at first and their control panel was easy to use, however we were noticing our site was slower at certain times of the day that others.  We later found out that the site was hosted on godaddy’s US servers and the times tied up with the peak usage times in the US.  When signing up for affiliate accounts we also had to declare that we weren’t hosting our site in the US for tax purposes.  We approached godaddy to get the site moved to their European servers however this involved cancelling our account and setting everything up from scratch, to much bother! So we were looking for a new host and found unlimitedwebhosting who are a UK based host (servers and technical support) and have so far proved an excellent choice.

We will keep you updated on any progress, all the best from the CTOP team.

As major milestones in this enterprise are achieved we will reveal all on this CTOP website.