Virgin SEO Space
February 25th, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Credit Cards, Mortgages, Herbal Viagra, Pay Day Loans, and Diet Pills the list goes on and on. For anyone who’s been in the SEO arena for any length of time chances are you got at least one if not quite a few websites in these spaces. Let’s face it the money is good so it makes a lot of sense to be there. However many SEO’s ignore virgin territory.
One of the great things about playing in virgin space is you get a clearer idea of how ranking algorithm’s work. From my experience searches have to hit a ‘critical mass’ for the ‘thing that looks, acts, and could be perceived as a sandbox but really isn’t a sandbox’ to kick in. It’s like playing in Google 3 years ago. The second best thing is since most SEO’s ignore the space there’s lots of traffic to be had with not a lot of work. Case and point see the graph below:
This domain was purchased last summer, and had some placeholder content up since December. However I hadn’t done any real work on it until last weekend (that’s why I wasn’t blogging), and I spent about 2 days working the onsite copy, and 2 days working some basic off site linkage. Less than 4 days later I had a nice piece of traffic, and the kicker is most of it came from Google:
Now I will tell you most of these clicks are in the $0.25 and under range, so you won’t be ordering that new Bentley anytime soon. However get a few of these in your stable and you’ll start building a nice monthly Adsense check. So like Robert Frost says sometimes it’s better to take the road less traveled.
Sphere It
February 25th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Man, this is crazy! Did you /. that site or what? I’m really curious what kind of links you got to that site to bring this kind of exposure
I’m wracking my brains trying to get at least slight idea on what kind of “virgin teritory” can bring this much traffic? Isn’t it saying 13K pageviews for 02/24 ?
Any hints on how to research/discover those territories?
February 25th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Nope no /. digg, or technorati, or any of that stuff. It’s about 4K uniques and 13K page views. The trick is to not think like an SEO and find things that are front of mind, topical and interesting to the John Q. Public.
February 25th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
The only thing I can think of are events that create sudden massive interest, but usually those interests are fading very fast.. Here are some ideas and even gross prospective traffic numbers http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060225/SPORTS17/602250364/1065
am I on the right track Michael?
February 25th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Give me a piece of that webmaster welfare check or I will expose your network…hehe kidding.
I kind of wrote about this yesterday in a less focused way on my blog. You are correct Michael, there is lots of real estate out there but still it doesn’t come for free. I know it for a fact that you put your all in everything you do so I bet the website is pretty damn cool and useful dude!
February 27th, 2006 at 7:47 am
I would be interested to know more about the type of ‘onsite content’ you put together in 2 days. This obviously isn’t the standard blog business model of slowly building traffic by posting regularly for years. Anything you can share?
February 27th, 2006 at 9:41 am
It’s not a blog technically, it’s more of a hybrid blog / standard website. It’s a subject I’m very familiar with so writing is both easy and quick, and it’s not a “deep” subject matter either.
March 6th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
My guess for your example website is (feel free to delete if correct):
Survivor.
But there are TONs of topics that fall into that category.
March 6th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
might be, might not, but there are tons and thats the point