SEO Venture Follow Up

Well, here it is half way through February, 2010.  I thought I would take a few minutes and summarize my SEO Venture experience and results.  And by the way, I checked earlier today and found that my site, www.snowmanornaments.org was still ranked on the first page of Google results for my primary search phrase "snowman ornaments".

I learned a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), web site design and marketing during this little experiment.  Using the various techniques that I learned I was indeed able to get my site placed on the first page of Google and, at one point, one actually ranked number one!  So, I can definitively say that SEO marketing techiniques work, if done correctly.  It is work, it takes time and effort but it can be done. 

What I also learned was the extreme importance of getting started early particularly if you are talking about a seasonal niche market as was mine. I started my experiment near the end of October for a Christmas seasonal niche.  That was way too late!  I should have started at least two month earlier.  Yes, my site reached a #1 Google ranking on December 9th but that was too late to make any money that season.  People have already made the bulk of the decorating purchases by then and I was still failing to drive traffic to my site.

That is the other major lesson I learned.  You can have a great Google ranking, even number 1, but if you don't drive traffic to your site what does it matter?  Traffic for my site started to pick up just in the month of December, again too late, and didn't generate any sales.  Based on what I was seeing on other specialty ornaments sites I don't believe my niche was too narrow or not viable.  I just failed to rate highly soon enough and failed to generate enough traffic to generate sales.

Because of my late start I can only call my SEO Venture a partial success.  Yes, I was able to create a web site and within a couple of months have it ranked on the first page of Google.  However, my other goal was to see if money could be made and that I did not do.

So, my SEO Venture experiment will continue.  It will go on hiatus for the next several months but around July or August I will pick it up again.  This time with the goal of generating real revenues.  I will get an early start with a web site that already has a high Google ranking.  There will be work to be done, a web site rewrite most likely and then I will need to learn how to drive traffic to the site.  Hopefully by this time next year I will be reporting success on the second goal of my SEO Venture.  In the mean time I will be reading up and learning about how to drive traffic to my site.  Until then!