Dominating Google First Page for 16 Keywords In 6 Months

As I had found out that Vancouver real estate market niche is highly competitive, I have been continuously promoting one of Vancouver real estate agents website for 6 months so far. Things were happening exactly as I’d predicted. Currently her website and all the web2 contents dominate first page of Google for multiple keywords. Actually not only it ranks top on Google, but on Bing and Baidu.

Here is the list of 16 highly ranked keywords for that website (on Google/Bing/Baidu):

keywords	ranking
温哥华华人房地产经纪	1,6,8
温哥华房地产	4,7,8,11
温哥华房地产博客	1,4,5,6
温哥华房地产播客	1,2,3,4
温哥华房地产投资	2,3,4,7
温哥华房地产经纪	3,6
温哥华海景公寓	9
温哥华海景房	3,4,8,10
buy homes in point grey vancouver	10
luxury homes for sale vancouver	1
point grey beach homes	1,2
point grey luxury homes	1,4,5,9
real estate point grey vancouver	1,3,6,7,8
sell real estate vancouver	9
top real estate agent Vancouver	1,2
vancouver point grey real estate	5,9,10

I am also monitoring other 15 keywords whose ranking is increased to 20 and above.

I had used almost all the search engine marketing methods including articles, web2, videos, bookmarking, directory, and podcasting. And I found that it usually take about 1 to 3 months for a domain to rank top 10 when using those multiple marketing methods consistently. I also found that videos were ranked much faster than other SEM method alone.

However for real estate, such a competitive niche, Google will not usually open up a window for video result for real estate related keywords. Therefore I had to use all the SEM marketing methods simultaneously.

For some of the keywords, Google happens to rank that website in the local business results, which is really a bonus for us. Because I didn’t add any geographic modifier to the keyword, Google still show the local business results.

It all matters to be on the first page of Google!

Why? Because organic search engine still reigns.

Natural search results, which are also known as organic search results, are critical to be successful in marketing online. After all, people are easily giving up after just one or two clicks when searching for something on the internet.

According to iCrossing, of all the organic search visits, 95.8% were on Google’s first page and then left for other search terms; only 2.5% of them went to the second page; and the remaining 1.7% might go further to third or forth pages.

That was true across the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search. Less than 2% of search-referred traffic came from clickers persistent enough to look for results after the second page.

That’s why businesses owners are willing to invest big in search engine optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits.

Note: The market share of organic search visits between three major search engines: Google 74%; Yahoo 13%; Bing 13%.

How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

What’s the word to better describe “Email deliverability”? – “Inbox placement rate” (IPR)

I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say “delivered” – because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need. The problem with the term “delivered” is that it is usually used to mean “didn’t bounce.” While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands. Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let’s come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search. If you run a web site, you certainly understand what SEO and SEM are, you care deeply about both, and you spend money on both to get them right. Whether “organic” or “paid,” you want your site to show up as high as possible on the page at Google, Yahoo, Bing, whatever. Both SEO and SEM drive success in your business, though in different ways.

The inbox is different and a far more fragmented place than search engines, but if you run an email program, you need to worry both about your “organic” inbox placement and your “paid” inbox placement. If you are prone to loving acronyms you could call them OIP and PIP.

What’s the difference between the two?

With organic inbox placement, you are using technology and analytics to manage your email reputation, the underpinning of deliverability. You are testing, tracking, and monitoring your outbound email. Seeing where it lands – in the inbox, in the junk mail folder, or nowhere? You are doing all this to optimize your inbox placement rate (IPR) — just as you work to optimize your page rank on search engines. One of the ways you do this is by monitoring your email reputation (Sender Score) as a proxy for how likely you are to have your email filtered or blocked. The more you manage all of these factors, the greater likelihood you will be placed in inboxes everywhere.

With paid inbox placement, you first have to qualify by having a strong email reputation. Then you use payment to ensure inbox placement, and frequently other benefits like functioning images and links or access to rich media. With this paid model, there’s no guarantee to inbox placement (don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), just like there’s no guarantee that you’ll be in the #1 position via paid search if someone outbids you. But by paying, you are radically increasing the odds of inbox placement as well as adding other benefits. There is one critical difference from search here, which is that you need good organic inbox placement in order to gain access to PIP. You can’t just pay to play.

SEM Myth: Branding For Uniqueness or Who You Really Are

Every business tend to brand its uniqueness against many other competitors who provide same or similar products or services. For the purpose of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), branding sometimes may go conflict with all the marketing effort to get traffic with high relevancy.

For example, a video conferencing company spends all its marketing efforts to brand themselves as a “video communications” company, just because their competitors do conferencing. But the problem is their customers do not see them as a “video communications” company. Their clients want video conferencing, and that’s what they see them as.

So when they put “video communications” as their main keyword to SEO their pages and hyperlinks, they got problem: their prospects couldn’t find them easily on search engines. That is a big mistake. A severe marketing mistake!

The correct way to both brand their business and to better SEM, they should add keyword modifier to their main keyword “video conferencing”. One way of doing that is to put location, i.e. county, zip code, into the main keyword.  “video conferencing Vancouver”  is a good keyword modifier sample. To add words which describing your quality is another great idea. For example, they can use “best video conferencing” or a combination of two as “best video conferencing Vancouver”.

Overall, it’s not an easy job to find those keyword modifiers which are both relevent to your services and attracting as many highly targeted traffics as possible to your site. It takes time and efforts in investigating and splitting test.

To employ a SEM expert to do the job for you will save you huge amount of time and money, if you don’t know how to do them yourself.