Road to One Million: Positioning a Niche from Scratch

Hey friend!

At Unancor, this year we are starting the season with a lot of strength and in addition to offering you high-quality sponsored content and links, we want you to learn with us through cool content. And that’s why we want to dive into SEO experiments where we will squeeze the Google algorithm to the max and you won’t be able to resist reading them. Of course, we will show you all the results of each experiment, whether we have them or not.

Positioning from 0 in Unancor Style

The first of the SEO experiments we are going to do is to position a website from scratch. We will meticulously break down all the steps and each of the SEO actions we will take. We will update each of the results we achieve and analyze the website in detail regarding profitability and traffic that we will obtain.

Let’s be honest…

We love being able to show you the results of our project, that you enjoy reading and learn a lot, but you, as a reader, will want to know if it is possible to make money from this. On the other hand, we also want the project to be PROFITABLE, that we make money from it and show it to you so that you can replicate it and earn a lot of money. We don’t just want to show you how good and beautiful our links are (which we do), we want to create a NICHE THAT MAKES MONEY.

ROI, ROI, ROI

Yes, that word you have seen everywhere; the damn ROI that all marketers chase and that hides behind a whirlwind of expenses and is sometimes hard to bring to light. I’m not going to give you a technical definition for that, the ROI is nothing more than the proportion of money I earn from what I invest.

SEO as a marketing action must have ROI, this KPI is presented with a ratio over the investment, but you also have to take into account that when considering an SEO project you have to evaluate.

• How much money do I have to dedicate and cannot dedicate to other projects?
• When will I reach the break-even point?
• How many hours do I have to dedicate to the project?

Time is a factor that is not valued enough when starting a purely SEO project. When we talk about an SEO project, I mean any website that can be monetized whose ability to generate money depends solely (or mostly) on the visitors it receives through Google traffic or any search engine organically.

The time invested (and to be invested) is something you should take very much into account when starting your website. For this, when conducting keyword research, you should consider whether you will need periodic content updates depending on the type of search or if it is a Rank&Money niche; that niche of passive income that we all want, those that are a money-making machine once you start ranking and receiving traffic, your only job is to watch your income grow.

First steps…

We need the project to have the perspective of fulfilling the following checklist:

• Relatively quick profitability.
• Medium/low competition.
• Passive income, which does not require updates once the project is finished.
• Monetization via ADSENSE.

Uff, I think I’m rambling too much. I want a practical approach, so throughout the content, I will tell you how I chose the niche and why.

SEO Strategy to Follow

When considering any monetization niche like this, you need to determine what SEO strategy you will follow. SEO is a complex discipline, but we could make a brief summary of certain points to address before considering a project and starting an organization of SEO actions for it.

Warning: This is not a rigid checklist, each sector is a world and each SEO project presents certain peculiarities and problems that need to be analyzed in detail.

• Keyword research
• Competition
• On Page Approach (content, structure, architecture, CTR, densities…
• Domain choice and URL structure
• Costs and Profitability
• Link building

The Fantastic World of Keyword Research

This is the first step when starting your SEOMoneysite. It will define how much money you will earn in the future and what keywords you will target to receive traffic, so you will need to conduct a thorough study of the selection and consider the surrounding variables.

Here, I’m not going to tell you how to do keyword research in detail, there are many ways to approach it, here I will explain how I did it for this case.

Since I didn’t have a clear theme, I didn’t care what to rank. I also don’t care if I feel comfortable with the theme or not, I just want to attract users and make money. If you are looking for a long-term project, a blog to live off, writing about something you are passionate about, driving traffic from other sources, or creating brand image, the issue is totally different.

SEO is a moldable discipline. The same things do not work for two different search niches. What works for your fitness blog may not work for an e-commerce selling handwritten copies of the Calixtine Code or a national newspaper. There are no generic SEO checklists.

Have I rambled again? Come on!

The Choice of Keywords

To discover new niches when I’m not interested in anything specific, I do a very simple thing: I analyze large sites. This way, very quickly and directly, you can analyze thousands of keywords. You will see the typical high-competition ones, but after some analysis time, the light bulb goes on and you see one that catches your attention.

It’s a practice I recommend when you want to start a new niche, you don’t care about the theme but don’t know where to start and want to launch it quickly. Be careful! This step is very important, I’m only mentioning a possibility for quick analysis, analyze the niche in question carefully because it is vital for the profitability of your project.

This is not the end of the keyword research, you will then have to google the results that seemed interesting to you and see if it is feasible in terms of competition.

After almost two hours filtering thousands of keywords, I found one that caught my attention. I’m sorry I can’t disclose the keywords or the domain itself, but I want to isolate the site completely to see real results. Moreover, I intend to monetize it, and exposing it publicly usually has more problems than advantages. Maybe I’ll make it public someday, but believe me, it’s not the most interesting.

If you are a beginner in analyzing all the keywords for which a specific domain ranks, you can use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Sixtrix.

The keyword that caught my attention had these data.

Hmm, 74,000 monthly searches and an estimated CPC of 0.25, not bad, right?

Long Tails

Another thing I liked about this keyword is the number of long tail keywords variants that could be replicated to the main one and aimed for a similar user response even though they had different themes.

Niche Competition

You might be wondering if there is any tool that gives you a metric of the difficulty of a keyword, I’m sorry to say NO. At least as of today, I don’t know any that does it with “prestige,” so you have no choice but to Google and see what, who, and how your future competition ranks…

The first result was an HTML page (quite shabby by the way) with very LITTLE CONTENT. I must say in its favor that the result meets the search intent objectives, but at the SEO level, it is frankly improvable. Moreover, the second result belonged to a page of the same domain, so it doesn’t seem that cannibalization was a problem for it.

Those of us who work in SEO have a strange vice, something that outside this world surely isn’t understood. Some will say we are damn nerds, but SEO is not a job, it’s a way of life. We love analyzing websites, dissecting the website to see improvement points and why not say it, feeding that sick EGO we all have inside thinking “damn, I would do it better.”

Well, that’s what I was doing, this website didn’t smell like SEO, at least no SEO had left a trace. SEOs leave a trace like the internet animals we are, we mark territory through our “Seomonas.” We want that if another SEO visits our website, they smell us and realize they are in enemy territory, that competing in the SERPs is going to be tough and that it’s better to look for another corner to pee in.

The link building wasn’t impressive either, not even enough to set off a firecracker. It was more like a burst of the little bubbles that come in packing plastic, but look at those results!

The referred domains were part of a kind of interlinked blog network, with the same website translated into other languages. They did take the trouble to use different IPs. Those of you who are clients of Unancor know that with a humble budget you can easily reach this…

The rest of the positions in the SERPs were made up of a couple of strong domains, but the landing page that was ranking was many levels away from the home page, so it probably wasn’t receiving much strength from the main domain. There was also an attempt at a microniche in more distant positions with barely 19 Referring Domains (visible).

Time to make an assessment: The DEFINITIVE decision

I was practically convinced. The niche met my expectations: the competition was not high for many keywords, there were a ton of long tails I could exploit up to the most difficult ones, it was easily monetizable through Adsense, it wouldn’t require daily updates (or very few)… But something caught my attention… There was an SEO lurking in the shadows… someone who had already done all this planning before and launched before me… and this had achieved…

1 MILLION ESTIMATED MONTHLY TRAFFIC!

Uff, I have an existential dilemma: the reason for the post, as I said at the beginning, was to do something easy, achieve it quickly, and show you profitability results, teach you how I am planning and executing SEO actions. However, this motivates me a lot, with the traffic you can do a lot of things and it must be cool to have a million visits a month. The problem distorted the main intention of the post, so I had to consult with our Marketing Manager to see if we could do it or if it was too complicated.

Challenge accepted!

On Page Approach

We need to have an additional advantage over the competition by performing a good on-page SEO.

Text Structure

Regarding the content, most results have practically nothing or are quite scarce. We are going to create content with semantic text, with its ordered Html headings and trying to attract long tails to start receiving rankings and give cool signals to Google.

Internal Linking

If we want to rise quickly, we will need to give a good push of links. Therefore, we want to control the PageRank in the best possible way, we want to guide it to the pages that interest us more, so we will do a super interlinking pyramid. Since it’s trendy to name things, I’ve decided to call it “in pyramid.”

In this case, I’ve decided to do it because I don’t care about navigation on my site, user response is not related to other landings within my website, good user experience NECESSARILY will occur because I respond to their search intent, they will hardly navigate to other pages, so I will decide to channel the Pagerank instead of channeling traffic through the website. (Note: I apply this to this specific case).

What does the super interlinking pyramid consist of?

I suppose you already know what a controlled interlinking consists of, my friend Romuald Fons explained it in one of his videos and his famous niche decalaveras, he calls it something else (I think), but we like pyramids. As you can imagine, interlinking helps direct the Pagerank within the same website and guides it according to our needs, so we can shape the “ranking strength” that each of our internal pages receives, logically distributing the most PageRank to the more complex pages to position, visually it could be seen as an inverted pyramid.

You should keep in mind that this transfer is not linear. There are patents within the Google algorithm that explain it (in this post by Álvaro Rondón you can learn more about link juice), that is, two internal links will not give double the strength to the destination page than if you link it once, but the greater transfer is evident.

Inverted pyramid image

Obfuscating, that’s gerund

We continue shaping the PageRank, the pages that are not interesting from a positioning point of view (Legal Notice, Contact, and similar…), will be “obfuscated,” meaning they will not be crawlable for the Googlebot.

If you want to know more about the topic, I recommend this video by Luis Villanueva.

CTR, tell users that your RESULT IS COOLER

Another aspect that the competition in the SERPs doesn’t work on at all is the optimization of the search snippet. They limit themselves to putting the title with the keyword and a rather dull meta description. We need to improve this point to “steal” visits from the competition at any cost. The SERPs are places of seduction, dress elegantly and wear your best perfume to win over the user.

• Titles and Descriptions with optimized attention-grabbing text.
• We use icons in both to stand out from the competition
• Tell the user why they should visit your site and not the others

Domain Choice.

In this case, I haven’t worried too much about the choice of domain since the main page is not going to be the target of ranking. I also don’t consider it too important when establishing an SEO project, or at least I don’t see it as a determining factor for ranking this project.

After considering what to do, I decided on a partial EMD, mainly to have “pretty” URLs, I’m not aiming for branding or anything like that. The users I manage to attract will enter and leave silently. Very few will return because I will have satisfied their search intent, maybe they will come back at another time but it won’t be a deep love relationship between the user and the money site.

To give an example, do you know the website definicion.de? Well, the structure of URLs will be similar.

Partial KW Domain.com / Partial KW

Costs and Profitability

Let’s get to the real part, the money part, because if you’re still reading this you want to know what profitability expectations I have and the costs I plan to incur in the project.

ATTENTION SPOILER: The forecasts I’m going to make here regarding profitability will not be fulfilled (they never are), but it’s good to do it to get a global view of the project’s profitability.

Costs

In money

• Domain 3.99 € + VAT
• Hosting 0.99 € + VAT
• 20 Texts 1000 words (1 €/100 words) = 200 €
• TOTAL = 204 + VAT

In time (in minutes)

• Kw Research 120 minutes
• Organization Structure and URLs 60 minutes
• I start to set up structure, install and configure the theme, menus, etc… 240 minutes
• TOTAL = 420 minutes

Income Forecast

This is the part where I’m going to get some backlash (maybe in others too), but,

What can we expect from this project?

As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to start with 20 landings and will gradually increase by about two/three monthly targeting other long tails with fewer searches but low competition.

Initially, the only monetization avenue will be Adsense, but I tell you that due to the nature of the niche it will not have a high CTR or a high CPC. I’m going to estimate the CTR at 1.5% and the CPC at 0.10 €.

• Sum of all searches / Monthly 270000
• Monthly Searches + Long Tails 324000
• Estimated Search CTR 40%
• Estimated Visits / Month 129600
• Estimated Adsense CTR 1.5%
• Estimated CPC 0.10
• Monthly Income 194.4 €

Yes friends, this is the sad reality of Adsense. For this type of niche, achieving approximately 130,000 visits a month can yield about 200 € monthly.

If you have no experience in this type of monetization, you might be surprised by the number of visits you need to attract to make money, but you should consider that these are monthly passive income. It will take me a significant initial effort, but after a few months, I won’t do much at all. If the project lasts over 3 years, that’s 7 or 8000 euros, if I dedicate a whole month of work (which I won’t do at all), then do the calculations of profit/hour of work ratio…

With a lot of traffic, you can do a ton of things if you have an open mind and are willing to explore other forms of monetization, so this project is perfect for other experiments I want to do and monetization alternatives I want to try.

I’m still taking risks, my nature is very gambler, I want to achieve the first 100K in 6 months. The project could stop here, but NO, the goal is 1 million. I plan to start earning 200€/month in 6 months, meaning in the first year, I can obtain 2500 € in income, if my expense is that during the first year, I achieve the break-even point that first year.

In any case, the end of this project is not just monetization, it is to show how to rank and make money online, teach how I’m doing link building and learn from successes and failures, show you the results I obtain and also help beginners see a project ranking (or not) from its initial phase, but WARNING…

I’m going for that million visits / month.

Link Building

Link building remains one of the fundamental parts of any SEO project; if you want to rise in positions, you must necessarily carry out a link creation strategy suitable for the niche in question. At Unancor as #linkbuildinglovers if you want us to help you with your link strategy, hit play and contact us.

If I want to reach that damn 1M, I need to make a ton of links. I may not need as many for certain keywords, but at the global project level, I will need many. Link building is a damn art, you can do it through many avenues, but all consume time and resources. For this case, I’m going to rely more on my wallet than on ingenuity, since, as I said, I want to dedicate the least time possible to this project, now that I think about it, wouldn’t a guide be cool? 😉

Summary of the Wallet Link Building

• Manual links through cool footprints
• Manual links from a list and not (too) spammed
• Super links in press and blogs by Unancor
• New 2.0 websites and with age for a clean anchor profile
• Competitor scraping to get easy links
• Purchase of reviews
• PBN

Analyzing my NÉMESIS: (Ahrefs data)

• dofollow 549 69%
• .gov 0 0%
• .edu 3 1%
• .com 547 68%
• .net 50 6%
• .org 19 2%

Yes, a ton, but…

Suspicious, right?

It’s very hard to make that amount of links in such a short time safely and with quality. Something smells fishy here.

Anchor Profile (Ahrefs data)

VERY AGGRESSIVE, I can’t make a calculation due to the volume they have, but barely brand, URL, and generics reach 10%, I will analyze it in detail later.

My intention is to create a clean anchor profile, I don’t want to be too clever and get an algorithmic penalty especially when I’m publicly exposing my work, so, for now, I will aim for an anchor text profile like this.

1. Brand, generic, and URL
2. Partial keyword
3. Exact keyword

Conclusions

• We are going for a million visits
• We need to improve the on-page part of the competition
• Pyramid interlinking
• Always monitoring the project and analyzing profitability in time and money
• We will need a good amount of links
• I will tell you EVERYTHING whether it goes well or badly.
• Unancor ROCKS

Dear reader, if you’ve made it this far, I have to give you a million thanks 😉. Just to say that I hope you liked the project, that you enjoyed the reading, and that you’re feeling a crazy urge to replicate it to go for a million. I’m sure I’ve left many things unsaid, but as time goes by, I will update with new things and you can follow them all in this post.

Ah!, if you liked it, don’t forget to share it on social media and if you have any comments or suggestions, or just want to be a bit of a hater, I’m here for whatever you need and penalty.

See you next time!

UPDATE Nº1 -> (Date) SEO Actions and Results

Coming soon…