I failed at SEO. Here’s what happened…
– Let's get real here. I don't care who you are or what level SEO guru you're
trying to portray yourself as, everyone fails at SEO. No one has a 100% success
rate and that includes me. In this video, I'm gonna analyze
my most recent SEO failure. You'll learn where I messed up and how much money it cost me so you can avoid making the
same mistakes that I have. Let's start at the beginning. The year was 2020. It was a freaking weird year, marked by "Tiger King" and "WAP." The Fed was also printing money like brrr to deal with
the economic fallout of the pandemic. Because of this, I was able to get lucky by selling one of my affiliate websites for a healthy $589,000. So at this point in time, I'm flying high. I'm confident AF, I'm untouchable, and I was gonna take some of that money to invest into another website, grow it and then flip it again later.
This is my model, and it had never failed me once before. To be honest, I think this confidence was part of my downfall, as I'll explain later. Anyways, back to the story. I already knew what niche
I wanted to get into because I do my niche research on marketplaces like Flippa. You see, when a website is up for sale, you can see it's niche, how much profit it's making and also what kind of
resources went into it in the form of content and backlinks. I found a website in the education niche, courses and whatnot,
making $20,000 per month. It only had 300 pages of content. It had a backlink domain rating of 21. This niche was easy street but I didn't wanna buy
this particular site because it was on sale for $800,000. That was way outside my budget. So here's what I did instead. The main keyword for the site is best course for blank. I Googled best course for blank and made a list of all the websites on pages two to four. I was gonna reach out
to each of these sites and make them an offer.
These sites were doing well, just not good enough
to make a lot of money and have an expensive purchase price. Here's what I sent them. Subject line, "Interested
in buying insert URL here. Hey there, Matt Diggity here, CEO and founder of Diggity Marketing and Affiliate SEO Agency Leadspring. I'll get straight to the point. I'm interested in buying your website from you at a generous market price, all cash upfront.
Are you interested in selling? If so, just respond to this email and we can set up a time to talk." Out of all the responses, I was interested in just one of them. Here's why. This website was ranked on page three for its main keyword but it didn't even have a proper article targeting it. The main keyword was
best courses for blank but this website had a best books for blank article in position 26. Surely if I write an article that matches the search intent
perfectly, it's gonna crush. On top of that, the website had a solid link profile with tons of DR 60 to
80 referring domains. So fast forward along, the guy wanted an extreme amount of money for his site that wasn't
producing that much income. Understandably, he was being emotional.
He had spent so much money on the site through an SEO agency that
wasn't getting results. Anyways, after months of haggling, I acquired the site for $31,000. This price was based on
an average monthly profit of $1,003 and a valuation
multiple of 30.9. I was so fired up to get started on the site, confidence through the roof. In fact, I was so confident, I launched a follow along case study called Project Cashflow
to document the journey. Spoiler alert, I only did the case study for four months just
because of how lame it went. (sad music)
(beeping sound) In hindsight, I now know what I did wrong. And by the way, if you appreciate honest and
transparent content like this, would you please smash the like button? That'll let me know to make
more videos just like this one. Once I got ahold of the site, I hit the ground running fast.
I redesigned the website based on my extensively optimized theme layout. People went bonkers for this
layout in Project Cashflow. After you finish here, check out my video called "I designed the
perfect affiliate website" to check out this layout. Link in the description. Next, I got the technical SEO
health audit score up to 97. Some of the technical
SEO issues were resolved by fixing missing alt tags, as well as missing meta descriptions. Removing duplicate H1s, changing some incorrect
internal nofollow links to dofollow and deindexing
the blogroll pagination. I also optimized the hell out of the site speed getting
the load time down to 743 milliseconds. I then optimized the
content on the site for SEO, making sure that content
was formatted correctly, the H1 title and URL, also known as the Three Kings
were optimized for keywords. I fixed the subheading structure, adjusted the word count on
pages that were out of whack, fixed keyword and entity frequency issues, made sure the content was readable and offered value to the readers. Then I fixed the
virtually empty About page with author profiles
and contact information, both requirements in Google's
quality rater guidelines.
Then it was all about
setting up a content plan that was gonna take this site to the moon. As you know, the main keyword
was best course for blank. First things first, I wrote a perfectly optimized article attacking that keyword. Then like any other smart
subscriber to this channel, I set out to create topical
authority for this damn course. Topical authority's when you
don't just write one article on a topic, you write all of the articles and when you do so, Google has no choice but to deem you a topical
authority in a niche, and then when a Google
core algorithm update hits, your traffic skyrockets. So I wrote review content
on all the courses in the niche, all the
versus keywords, course X versus course Y and informational
articles that had to do with the courses themselves, what dates this course X happened, who can apply to course Y, everything.
When I acquired the site,
it had 150 pages of content. Today, it has 339. And you bet your buns, I built links too. In the first month, I
got a citation packed from Authority Builders
to establish a base of foundational links. I started a guest post campaign building about 10 links per month. I was also dripping HARO
links in since day one. Since the start of November 2020, over 1,000 referring domains were built and the domain rating went from 22 to 39, which is well good enough
to compete in this niche. So what was the result
after all this effort? Check this out. Here's the traffic growth
in Google Analytics since the project was started. If you compare last month to the first 30 days, there's
a 272% increase in sessions.
What the hell am I complaining about? To make matters even more confusing, here's a screenshot of my rank tracker. Almost every keyword made
it to the top of Google. Almost every keyword,
except the main keyword. The one that this whole
project's profitability hinged on never made it to the first page of Google. It got close but it never broke through and as a result, profit never took off. In fact, it's making
just barely a bit more than it did in the beginning. But I had put so much time
and money into the site. Remember the last person
that owned the site that was getting emotional
about the money he put into it? Well, that's what happened to me too.
I didn't wanna lose. So guess what I did? I poured more money into it, of course. The site was cursed when it came to ranking for that one keyword. So my team and I did some
next level brainstorming to try to fix it. So before we'd gotten topical authority for best course for blank. This time, we wanted topical authority for courses in general. We started writing literally every piece of content on courses. What is a course? Are online courses better
than in-person courses? We went nuts. Like I said, we were getting emotional.
Also around this time, the Google Product
Reviews update came out, which got us thinking that we
need to beast mode the quality of our best course for blank review. So I (beep) you not, we conducted a study to
see how much each course had improved student scores
before and after they took it. No one in this niche had anything close to this level of research. All in all, we spent $55,000 on the
site, $35,000 to purchase it and an additional $20,000
investment to try to grow it. I did everything I could to
try to get this damn keyboard to page one, but no dice. So I decided to give up on it, and you can imagine how gut wrenching of a feeling it was to give up after all this time and
money had gone into it. So what happened to the site? I put the (beep) on autopilot.
I stopped creating content for the site and stopped building links. Now it just exists making
1,000 bucks per month. Eventually it'll pay itself back. But man, Matt, you're an idiot. So where did it all go wrong? On day one when I decided
to acquire the site. (people facepalming)
(film beeping) The success of the site
hinged on one keyword and even though I had supreme confidence that I could get to the top
of Google for that keyword, I forgot that some sites
are just straight up cursed for particular keywords. That's why it's important
to always choose a niche and a domain name that's expandable. While this site was meant to beeline for best course for blank, if I would've just started on
a general course review site, I could have pivoted to
reviewing any course. Instead, I put all my eggs in one basket and the stupidest thing, look what I wrote in month
one of Project Cashflow.
The crucial evaluation factors for buying a website include
is revenue overly dependent on one or two pages? Then look how dumb I am. After that, I wrote, in the
case of Project Cashflow, I wasn't overly concerned
with the factors above. – [Both] Damn.
(film beeping) – Luckily, you can't fire
the owner of a business. Sorry, guys. Rule number one, always start or buy sites with a branded domain name in a highly expandable niche. Don't hinge your success
on any one keyword. Rule number two, know that affiliate marketing
is like playing roulette.
You don't win all the time. The good thing is that you
do win most of the time. What would you do if there was a game in the casino with an 80% success rate? You'd sit your ass down and
play it a million times. Likewise, you should also
have a few projects going at the same time. The more games you play, the
more chances you have to win. Rule number three, this 80%
win rate has a catch to it. It depends on how well you do your SEO. Do crap SEO, and your
success rate drops to 30%.
Do everything perfect and you
get closer to 80% and above. What happened to me is
I broke my own rules. I didn't stick to the SEO plan that had never failed me before, and has never failed me since. If you'd like to learn what that plan is, join my free affiliate SEO masterclass. It details everything I'm doing today in 2023 to get sites to the
top of Google consistently. And make sure to subscribe for more videos just like this one..