Niche:
Weight loss
Earnings before:
$4k/month
Earnings after:
$33,095/month
Increase:
727%
Site Size:
128 pages
This was actually the first client that we worked with at The Search Initiative. When the client Jon came to us, he had discovered a new weight loss pill and search volume was exploding. Already Jon was making $4k per month but got stuck.
Once I had diagnosed the niche and the site, it was clear to me that winning this niche was simply a matter of link juice. Namely, who could supply more powerful links, and faster? Over the course of a month and a half, we built over 30 high quality links to the site and almost instantly reaped the rewards.
The site speed for this site was struggling since the client was on a subpar host. Knowing that speed was key and 45% of
the site’s traffic was coming from mobile, the client and I decided to move over to WPX, my preferred host for money sites. Once we switched over, my team and I dropped the site load speed from 8 seconds to 1.3 seconds. Over the course of a week, I saw a ranking increase of 5 spots, which was actually the first break the client had onto page 1.
I noticed that the competition was lacking respect for the fresh content algorithm. Since I was already building so much authority to the site from the backlink campaign, I decided it would be best to try to rank for other trending keywords around dieting. I pushed out various articles on celebrities that had made recent weight loss transformations, and guess what? They ranked.
At the same time, we were the only site on page 1 that was steadily growing over time.
Everyone else was stagnant.
You can learn more about my recommendations for satisfying the fresh content algorithm in my Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide found in your subscriber resource page.
One thing about this niche… it was DIRTY.
People were reporting each other left and right.
Other websites we worked with in this niche had been slapped due to thin content.
As a result, we decided to disguise the
affiliate aspect of the client’s site.
• No more monetizing the homepage
• Front page now looks like a magazine about dieting, not a supplement review site.
We ran Facebook PPC traffic to grow the Facebook page for this site to over 20,000 members.
In doing so, we were able to generate, on-demand, as many social signals as we wanted.
At the same time, I started writing monthly posts about promotions for the product we were selling, which was allowing the client to stay in the mind of the buyer.
For any site receiving a massive amount of traffic for an important topic (e.g.: weight loss), I highly recommend collecting email addresses.
Some niches die out. It happens. We’ve seen many niche websites go from generating tens of thousands of dollars a
month, to only generating a few hundred.
Because of the 8k subscriber email list we had created, the client can easily pivot and market new products to these folks. In fact, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Email marketing is something I cover in fine detail in the Email marketing page.
