Holy #$%*! we made it to page 1 on Google!

Erik Lagerway is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.

“Build it, and they will come.” Suuure they will, after spending thousands per month on Adwords!

Here is snippet of my recent SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experiences over the past 7 weeks. I briefly describe how I brought Lypp.com from page 61 on Google [for keywords “conference call”] to page 1, without spending a penny on Adwords.

Unless you have been sleeping for the past decade you will know that your search rank can play a significant roll in the growth of any business.

As part of my quest to make Lypp the number one Conference Call service in Canada and the US, I knew I had to do something about our non-existent Google search results for both google.com and google.ca. “Conference call” was showing more than 55 million results, it was obvious to me that this was not going to be easy.

Adwords worked for me in the past but that was years ago and the offering was much different. I was uncertain about the kind of results we would get this time around but even if we weren’t going to maintain an adwords campaign we still needed that data.

We decided to give it a go and hired an SEO specialist to assist us in organizing our Adwords program. Well, it certainly worked. He got us to the top of the search results for various terms, “conference call” being one of them. We also ended up paying more than $6k a month in adwords for that privilege. Yes, we were getting sales, nearly 3 accounts per day. That brought our COA (Cost of Acquisition) to a whopping $50-300 per sign up. Much too high for a startup with zero outside funding. Needless to say, we came to the conclusion rather quickly that we had the data we needed and shut the Adwords program down. With it went a healthy portion of our new signups.

I went back to the drawing board. I took the data we gathered and analyzed it, then I spent a considerable amount of time investigating various pay-for and organic SEO and SEM strategies.

The keyword phrase “conference call” and associated “conference calling”, “conference call companies” are some of the most competitive, and subsequently expensive keywords in the biz. The data we gathered clearly showed that if we wanted Lypp to be the successful conference calling company we knew it could be we would need to rank at least within the top 10 results and more likely the top 5 results for a given keyword phrase.

In the process of my investigation and SEO research I came up an organic Google placement recipe that seemed like it should work, and it wouldn’t include any Adwords campaigns. It seemed too good to be true but I couldn’t afford anything else, so off I went.

I started with the basics…

As any respectable SEO consultant will tell you that there are a few major points that you need to consider when approaching SEO and making your site rank higher in a given Google search:

  • Good and relevant content
  • Links to your site
  • Relevant Meta and Title tag

This in itself is nothing new. People have been saying the same thing for a while now, what they are not saying is how to do it. There are many books on the subject as well, many are again simply laying out the basics for the layman but very few will give you the actual methods used.

I quickly found out that a good organic SEO methodology is much like cooking. A good chef is not likely to give up his much sought after recipe, no matter how many times you ask him. You might get the bulk of the ingredients but never the the secret sauce or special treatments when preparing the dish. And much liking an outstanding meal, a good organic SEO strategy is worth it’s creators weight in gold.

I think my SEO recipe is working… Today Lypp.com is sitting in the top 10 on google.com when searching for “conference call” and our sales are on the rise once again. My goal is to get into the top 5 for that term and a few related search terms as well. If I can pull it off I will post the results and some additional insight.