Organic SEO, Long Tail Keywords and the Cost of a Custom WordPress Website
I’m going to explain what is meant by organic SEO, how to get it and I’ll even drop a super secret way you can knock it out of the park! How sweet is that?
This morning, in my Facebook Stream I came across this interesting question. My friend Rob tends to ask thought provoking questions. I think this one was just his way of gathering information for an upcoming block buster post that he’s famous for.
More interesting though was the answer that Sam DeBord put forth.
Sam’s answer to Linsey was spot on. Organic SEO. That’s the best investment part he’s talking about.
Let me break that down for you.
ORGANIC SEO
Organic SEO is what happens when someone you don’t know Googles something and your site comes up as one of the results. Now, to be clear I’m not talking about one of the paid ad results. That is NOT organic SEO.
Organic SEO is hard to get, it’s hard work and it’s not something you can stop working on once you achieve it.
What that person types into Google could be a wide variety of items. Here’s an example.
A real estate agent might want to rank high for “Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres”. The problem is that the keyword probably has a lot of competition. You cannot hope to hit page one of Google by creating a page on your site titled “Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres” and have it load the IDX map of said homes. Simply put, trying to organically rank high for this is a losing strategy.
LONG TAIL KEYWORDS
The Long Tail is a strategy that you can win at. It still takes work but it’s something that you can achieve.
What is the Long Tail? It’s simply longer search terms. You might think of more specific search terms. Instead of “Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres” a long tail keyword might be “3 Bedroom, 2 Bath Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres with a Pool”.
I build custom WordPress Websites and while I may like to rank for that I don’t. I do rank high for relative long tail keywords. Here’s a video of that.
Does that better explain a long tail keyword strategy? If not, here’s an excellent post you can read (Yoast Explains the Long Tail).
And finally let’s talk about
THE COST OF A CUSTOM WORDPRESS WEBSITE
Sam mentioned $500 for 4 websites. Simple math says that’s $125 a month per website but I’m not what that figure includes. Is that just for hosting? What was the initial cost in building those 4 websites?
Real estate people are familiar with closing costs. They generally break down into Non-Recurring Closing Costs and Recurring so I’ll use that analogy.
I build websites in one of two ways. One in which you setup your own hosting and own everything and the other in which you use my hosting and you own your content.
The first way will cost you $10 a month or less for hosting, close to $60 for IDX. Both of those are ongoing (Recurring Closing Costs). The NRCC would be the fee to build the site and that starts at $1,000 and goes up depending on the options you want or need.
The second way has a lower upfront fee ($499) but has a slightly higher recurring fee. Hosting also includes my managing the backside of your account. Backup, updates and changes. This is $54 a month. Add an IDX of $60 to the equation and you are right at the cost Sam mentioned in his comment.
THE SUPER SECRET ORGANIC SEO TIP
We know people like to search the internet by talking to their phones. If they were potential home buyers and we were looking to rank for long tail keywords you might have created a page called “3 Bedroom, 2 Bath Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres with a Pool”. Actually if you did that you also created pages for
- “3 Bedroom, 2 Bath Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres under $750,000”
- “4 Bedroom, 3 Bath Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres under $750,000”
- “5 Bedroom, 3 Bath Homes for Sale in Sunny Acres under $750,000”
and so on, right? Do you see what I did there? The title of each of these closely matches what someone might actually ask their phone. The list could go on and on.
Each page you would have embedded the IDX for that particular custom search.
The problem becomes displaying all of those pages.
Here’s the answer: One of the items I can build into a website is a custom post type. Let’s use FAQ as an example. If you created each of those pages as a FAQ you could easily display them all on a single page.
But wait! It get’s better. This is a little technical but just follow along…
Because it’s a custom post type, I can create a XML sitemap for each entry that would automatically notify Google that it exists and that they should come index it over on your website.
While the mass of questions would ‘appear’ on a single page, because each is it’s own post, Google would look at each individually and index each and every one of them.
Compare that to the old way where you might put all of these FAQs in a single page manually. Google would put value in the top few and almost no value in the ones further down the page.
You want to win the long tail keyword contest? I just gave you the winning answer.
All you need is one of my websites, and IDX that allows you to build custom searches, and a custom post type like I described.
Are you ready for a website that rocks?
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He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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