If you follow this site, which is now almost 3 years old, you’ll know that at the time SEO Autopilot was launched we started a ranking experiment.
We picked a niche that is moderately competitive – one that you can look up yourself, and, just as importantly, one I have some level of experience in, and looked to rank a new site.
I think at the time I said I would update the post regularly.
Ooops!
OK. Life got int he way a little bit and it has been a while. In May of this year I looked again at how the site was ranking for 8 keywords for local and national SEO. To make it clear, these are not international rankings. The competition internationally is incredible hard and as the services I’m affiliated with are only saleable through the UK there would be little point in competing internationally.
May 2019 to September 2020
Updating the original links and adding more.
Looking at the progress. We stalled. It was clear more links would be required and that the content would need to be improved in places. Some of the content had become un-indexed. This means Google had assessed it and decided to ignore it.
Fair enough. Content is king after all.
I saw the decline set in in November 2019. Although one of the high competition keywords had improved a little, it was still well out of the front page of the search engines, so not bringing any business. Others had dropped back
I decided to fix it. I spent the best part of 2 days creating 30 small pieces of content using some of the tactics I’ve talked about in the past such as speech to text.
I manually altered several bits of content in profiles that seemed to be under performing.
This is a laborious task. It took perhaps 15 minutes per profile to log in, scan read what was there, and write perhaps another 150 to 200 words.
I fired up SEO Autopilot and scanned for high domain authority sites that I did not currently have links on. I was pleased to find no less than 12 new sites with a DA above 60 that allowed the user to add a good amount of content.
Note. There are many more new sites than 12 added in the last 16 months. However I was only interested in ones that had a very high DA and allowed the user to add hundreds of words of content. I’m a very strong believer that the content surrounding the links is what powers them, A link in a forum profile surrounded by white-space or irrelevant content is not 1% as powerful as a link on a page with a few hundred words of well crafted, on point and unique content.
SEO Autopilot created the profiles in quick time with a success rate of 11/12. Or 91.6% if you prefer. I created the one missing profile by hand. I then went into these profiles and added the content I’d created previously and tidied them up. Adding images etc.
Tier 2 links
The real strength of SEO Autopilot, like all clink building tools, for me at least, is the creation of second tier and indexing tier links.
Note: This is because I do not do “churn and burn” linking or offer linking as a service or gig.
SEO Autopilot can absolutely create 1st tier links if you are prepared to take a little risk, or, as I do, go into the profiles it creates and add, fix and amend stuff by hand. The niche this is in is something I want my website to last for years and bring a steady income. Investing a day or two up front on ensuring I have great first tier links will pay for itself 100x over if the site is still sending people to my affiliate partners in 3 years.
Second and index tier linking is a task that I could not do manually, even if I tried. It would take hundreds of hours. SEO Autopilot makes it simple. Maybe 90 minutes set up and away it goes.
Each 1st tier links has perhaps 10 second tier links. Each second tier link is indexed with approximately the same number of indexing links. This is for the existing links (41) and the 12 I added.
53 first tier = 500+ second tier and a few thousand indexing links.
Resources
That is where the work is.
The Results
The results were not quick. In fact as of May 2020 I was considering having a third push. However’ instead of that I checked the 1st tier links. They were all (all 53) indexed and up. So instead of creating more, I added another dose of second and third tier links. Just a handful, drip fed over 6 weeks from May 4th to mid June.
Then I waited. 11 weeks more. There were fluctuations and the site stats for visitors went up dramatically, though referrals to sale only increased about 20% from “not much” to “a little bit more than not much”
However. In August just gone the numbers spiked hard. An increase in visitors of almost 500% from 120 a day to between 550 and 600 a day. The sales figures went up almost five fold as well. To what might be considered (just about) a liveable income.
As a separation of effort. Without SEO Autopilot none of this would be possible. SEO Autopilot created all the accounts for every tier, and populated the content for 2nd and indexing tier. The set up for all of that took perhaps 3 hours across both linking pushes.
Manually it would not have been remotely possible. Thousands of hours at least. I wouldn’t have even considered the task.
The content writing took me perhaps a day and a half for the links and the monitoring was done by my favourite SEO Ranking tool… (free trial below if you are interested)
and was an incidental task done while I was doing other things as well.
Here are the results. Now sorted by quarter rather than by month.
The results are ones I’m very happy with. The time it has taken to achieve them is an issue, but that is not the fault of the software. I did nothing for more than a year as I worked on my bricks and mortar business.
7 of the 8 keywords are now page 1. Though there is some improvement as to the page one position I can work on in the future. I’m also getting traffic from search engines for around 30 other keywords I did not specifically optimise for. Often compound phrases that contain some of the commercially valuable words I targeted.
That’s not to say this is super quick. This is a tough niche and a 3 month wait after each major push, and the need to perhaps do more than one major push was something I factored in and understood from the beginning.
All that said, I could have been in this position well over a year ago. If you are considering taking the plunge and promoting your own website in a moderately competitive niche, this is all very do-able.
Good luck!