This is a public service announcement for the good of the SEO community…
Add content to your current sites.
Post complete.
If you listened to Hayden’s recent podcast interview with Spencer from NichePursuits.com, you will know that Hayden’s strategy for building sites has shifted from building small MFA sites around 2 years back, to bigger 15-25 page sites around 18 months ago and now to building big authority sites or at the very least, adding new content to existing sites.
You may have read that we’re putting a team of SEO hotshots together to live in Valle De Bravo and all up, there will be times where there are a dozen of us there just going nuts building out sites and immersing ourselves in all things SEO.
Longer-term readers of NoHatSeo.com will know Hayden is a one post per month kinda guy, so I’ve been given the privilege of communicating what we’re up to and sharing as many pearls of SEO goodness as possible with a very un-nohatseo.com-like frequency. We might even post multiple times per week!
You can expect plenty of information on the blog over the coming months to document how we’re building out big sites, how they are going by way of earnings, ROI that can be expected through adding content to established sites and just basically filling you in on what we’re up to.
Although what you’re about to read is hardly unheard-of, cutting-edge SEO, the sole aim of this post is to give you a little prod towards taking action on something that will likely help you to make $s within the next 4 weeks.
That something is….
Adding content to your current sites.
Simple to do, but I bet that 95% of people reading this post with a site that is ranking on page 1 for a decent KW and making some money, have not gone back and looked at their KW research since launching the site.
Almost without fail, there will be additional KWs that you have not yet targeted on your site, that if you were to add an article on, would rank quite quickly and make you money within a month or two.
We have PLENTY of sites like this and we’re addressing the issue right now.
In a recent post, I covered how long it is taking to rank new sites right now (4 months at best usually).
A few days ago, we launched a 7500 silo of content on an existing 12 month old, approx 25 page site. It doesn’t rank for all KWs, but it has decent authority and new pages that are added tend to rank quite well.
3 days after putting the new content on, below are the rankings of some of the KWs targeted on one 1700 word article.
- That is a combined search volume of 3600, with other KWs I have not entered into the rank tracker.
- The average CPC for those keywords is around $2.50.
- Medium-high advertiser competition.
It wasn’t so long ago that a KW set like that would warrant a stand-alone site.
Nowadays, given that it is taking so long to rank content on new sites, you’ve got to ask yourself the question.
1. Am I better off starting a new site this month from scratch?
OR
2. Am I better off running some fresh KW research on my current sites and finding a few KW sets to create a new article on?
Beyond faster rankings, adding content to new sites requires less links to rank, takes less time (no new site install/setup), reduces costs (no domain and hosting cost, no link building cost etc) and bigger sites are arguably less prone to penalties/falling foul of Google algorithm changes etc.
Again, you’ve probably heard the whole “add content to your current sites and it will rank quickly” message before so the aim of this article was not to present you with new ground-breaking SEO strategy.
However, hopefully it spurs you to re-research your niches and add some more content to current sites.
Job done in my part if you’ll be doing exactly that right now.
Mohit says:
Great Article, I wish to know how many keywords should we put in so that we avoid keyword stuffing. Like you showed in example above for 1700 words you have got 10-12 keywords.
So I just want to know for Long Tailed Keywords what is the number I can stuff inside articles without getting any penalty?
GregNunan says:
We aim for less than 1% KW density for any given KW. For longtail KWs, a single mention or 2 is all that’s required. There is no penalty for having too many different KWs, so long as the article reads well. Where you get into trouble is when you mention any given KW too often.
Mike says:
Great article, this is quickly becoming my favorite SEO/niche site out there.
So I have a site where I’m trying to do exactly this — I have a couple of KWs ranking in the top 5, so now I’m trying to target some lower comp KWs in new articles/posts as well as you suggest.
My question is in regards to link building. I have a very small PBN of my own, which I have already used to link out to my two pages ranking in the top 5. So, would you recommend using the same sites from this PBN to link out to the new money pages that I’m trying to rank?
Or would having, say, 4 links from one PBN site pointing to the same money site be too much, and reduce the link juice?
If so, how would you recommend trying to rank the new money pages with links, if I’ve already used my PBN to link to my other money pages from the same site?
Hope that made sense.
GregNunan says:
One option is to add content to the pages that are already ranking well and that have been link built. You can add some 250 word sections targeting the long tail KWs. Take a look at this article, which outlines how to make one page sites, but you can apply the same process to any page.
You can use internal linking too… so create a new article targeting long tail KWs, then link to that article from your current main pages on the site as the link juice will flow through to your new internal page. You may find that you can rank without and direct links.
We only link build to our money sites from PBNs with a single article.
Shan says:
Hi Greg.
I have a site where the homepage is having 1600+ words.
Within the homepage i used long tail keywords many time which also included the money term again and again. For ex. My target keyword is, Snooring Pill and i have used this keyword in all long tail keyword. as ” best snooring pill,natural snooring pills, does snooring pills really work, top raed snooring pills. lie goes on.
Is there any risk by doing so? If yes, what i need to do now how can i reduce the number crrectly?
GregNunan says:
Hi Shan,
Yes all mentions of “snoring pill” will count to the KW density of that term. So “best snoring pill”, “natural snoring pill”, “cheap snoring pill”, “snoring pill reviews” etc would all contribute to the density of “snoring pill”. The only way to get around this is to use synonyms e.g. “natural snoring medication”, “natural snoring cure”, “pill for snoring” etc.
Phil Whitley says:
Thanks Greg – GREAT article!
GregNunan says:
Thanks Phil!
Michael Bely says:
Thanks for the article.
The idea of ranking the pages of the existing site instead of ranking a new site from scratch sounds good. And it is worth trying (at least I will try it as soon as I can).
But there is one caveat IMO. It is like putting all eggs in one basket. If the whole website is penalized, all rankings will be lost. So it is an old play with choice – profit vs risk :)
GregNunan says:
Thanks Michael. Balancing act for sure. We’re in a position where we have plenty of sites and resources. I’m a big advocate of building sites in batches. Launch 3 at a time, one tighter small niche site, one with 25-100 page potential and with authority site potential.
Michael Bely says:
Yes, Greg, depending on available resources one should estimate the risks, potentials and choose a suitable strategy.
Thanks for revealing a piece of your strategy :)
GregNunan says:
Our pleasure!
Anne says:
Hi Greg
Really enjoyed this post – its great that you will be doing some more regular ones – well done!
Can you explain the silo concept a bit more ie how you set up the silos on the sites. So if you have a 7500 word article do you do that like you do a one page site, or do you do multiple posts all linked to each other under a category. ie is the silo just a collection of posts all targeting related keywords?
GregNunan says:
Anne, that’s a blog post or two to answer effectively. We do have it on out content plan though. Stay tuned!
Theodore Nwangene says:
Great post Greg,
I enjoys every bit of all you shares here, superb indeed.
I think i also second with the idea of creating contents for existing sites rather than creating new sites all together for the same reasons you stated here.
However, i have a few questions for you if you don’t mind…. Thanks in advance.
1. How many articles do you normally add to your PBN before linking to your money sites and do you usually create a single homepage PBN?
2. Will it be advisable to link to two money sites from one expired domain?
3. Do you advise building links to internal pages more than the homepage?
Thanks once again for this one of a kind post Greg, looking forward to your response.
GregNunan says:
Hi Theodore, thanks for the comment and questions!
1) 3
2) yes certainly! IN fact, if you set them up as Hayden suggests in this webinar, you should be able to use each expired domain to link to ALL your money sites.
3) I covered that here, but in short, yes plenty of links should go to internal pages.
John M. says:
Hi Greg,
Good article. In the last few weeks, especially with the new-site-sandbox, I also debated about building smaller vs. bigger sites. The biggest issue I have with this is having a limited-size PBN of around 20 domains. The advantage of having lots of small sites is that you can use your PBN over and over again, so each site getting 20 links, which is usually enough to rank for most low-med comp terms. However, if I have just one big site, I could use my PBN only once – and with a big site, i.e. 50+ articles, 20 links don’t seem to make that much of a difference anymore. So either you only have a few “real money pages” on these authority sites and the rest is just filler content (quality though) or targeted to extreme longtails…or I don’t know how else this can be made work with a small PBN.
Also, when you speak of a 7500 word silo, how many words are there on average per page? I recently ordered 5×750 word articles and hope that is long enough to appear as “quality” or are the 1500+ word monsters really necessary?
Thanks,
John
GregNunan says:
Hi John,
1) You do need to take into considerations the resources at your disposal which is why I am very keen to make it clear that small niche sites (5-25 pages) are still perfectly fine to build. We’ll be adding a lot of content surrounding building bigger sites, because a) we have a ton of smaller sites already and b) we have the resources in place (big PBN, plenty of access to content, a team to help), but I am hoping that we don’t put people off niche sites, but rather provide an insight into what’s required and the ROI on building bigger sites/expanding small sites into bigger sites.
2) 750 word articles are fine. The best way to define a word count is just to write an article and keep writing until you cover the topic sufficiently. If you look at the ave word count on most pages that rank nowadays, it’ll be around 1500 in many cases. Those pages will rank for a ton of KWs. So if you have 5 x 750s, it might be worth seeing which articles can be combined into very resourceful articles vs keeping them all as separate 75 word articles.
John M. says:
Sorry, one more thing. Getting so much content is obviously also quite a logistical challenge. Assuming you guys don’t have the time and nerves to write a 100+ page site yourselves…any pointers where you can get quality content in bulk without paying crazy amounts?
GregNunan says:
We do get a bit of content via our Internships as Interns go through the training process and this is part of what I point out re us having resources. We also, quite luckily, came across a VA outsourcer who has a team of 60 writers and she does a TON for us at $1 per 100 words. We have also used IWriter (4+ star articles only). I like iWriter over finding writers on ODesk etc as you can reject the crap articles that you receive through iWriter and not pay anything and it will be turned around for you very quickly.
Hayley says:
Hey Greg – what are you guys using for KW research these days?
GregNunan says:
We have an internal tool. But we also teach our Interns a method of KW research using the Google Keyword Planner and Moz. Long Tail Pro is a good option also.