Ranking A New Site From Scratch, Day 0

Hey WooNation!

Jason here.

Recently, a friend of mine needed help to rank a brand new website on Google for their B2B service.

Not one to shy away from a challenge, I decided it would also be a good series to put on SERPWoo as well. A series to help to show you what it takes to get a new domain and site prepped and setup for ranking in Google.

While I can't out their domain, keywords, or niche ( come on, that would be a death blow to them ).. I will be showing you all the processes and screenshots that it involves over the series.

Many things I show you will be simple and easy. Maybe even too simple for some of you advanced folks.

A few things will be advanced and probably shouldn't be outed. I'm debating if I should even show them to the general public.

However, the idea will be to show you the thinking process, decision making skills, and carefully considered choices made that takes a basic idea and turns it into a ranking website that generates money and traffic.

So How Much Time Does This Take?

Since this is a side project for me helping my friend, I am not working on it full-time every day. Many weeks I didn't work on the project at all. So results will be typical for someone who is doing this as a non-critical focus with very little time or money.

All in all, I have worked on this project for 6 months total so the first 4-6 posts in this series will be written rather quickly, while posts after that will come every month or so as we play out the series in real-time.

While this image can not explain certain promotions or tactics I used, I'm going to post it here as a reference so you can see the ups and downs from the beginning of this project.

Show Us Some Data!

While the above image shows data for ALL the keywords in our Google Search Console, there are really only 3 keywords we really want to rank for.

Here is how that data looks.

Keyword #1:

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Keyword #2:

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Keyword #3:

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While many of you might laugh at this, I think it's not too bad considering:

• This is a brand new domain that does not contain the keywords we want to rank for.

• Part-time focus and work. Many weeks of no touch.

• Competitors are very well known and established.

• Almost zero links built to the website.

  • Of the links that do exist, they all go to the homepage with brand anchors.

• Only 7 pages of content.

  • And this content is less than 1,000 words total ( all 7 pages ) for the whole website.

So with very little work, 2 of our top terms are sitting on the 2nd page of Google. Our 3rd top term is on the 4th page. We have a ton of long tail terms bouncing all around.

And we haven't really written any content yet or built any serious backlinks either.

It's all on a vanilla WordPress install ( no plugins ) with a really poor and un-optimized theme.

I finally installed the first plugin on May 4th ( 2 days ago ). It was Yoast.. so I helped my friend all this time without any SEO plugins.

So, is this a series you would like to see started and updated?

At this point, a little work in content and backlinks is more than enough to push our 3 top terms to page 1 results.

My friend isn't looking to overtake positions #1-3, he just wants to sit next to the big brands and build up his brand exposure and trickle away their users with a better value and experience for now before he tries to overtake them later.

This also helps to have reviewers and reporters find us, talk about us, and build links to us from their review sites ( natural backlinks ).

As always, reach out to us with comments, concerns, and suggestions below.

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