One Year Later (Earnings and Traffic Update)

A lot of you have been asking me for a Niche Site Duel update and I’m happy to share my latest report with you today – exactly one year after posting my very first announcement about the challenge.

One year after deciding to build a niche site from scratch, I now own the #1 ranked security guard training website in Google which has earned well over $5,000.00 since earning its first dollar in March. I have also been approached by several investors who were interested in purchasing the site from me for upwards of $25,000, which I declined.

On the first of this month (August, 2011), I went live with a brand new design, which I outlined here in my July Income Report. The design looks much more professional, but nobody was quite sure what would happen to my rankings, traffic and earnings.

I now have 2 weeks of solid data since the update to share with you.

Note: I try not to link directly to my niche site from SPI. If you’d like to visit, you can check it out at SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com.

RANKINGS AND TRAFFIC
I’m glad to say that none of the related keywords I’ve been paying attention to have dropped in search engine rankings.

Actually, according to the Scroogle Scraper (which is a search engine used to search through Google anonymously without any record of previous searches, which can skew the rankings that you see), many of the more highly trafficked keywords that I’ve been paying attention to have risen.

keyword – ranking:

Security Guard Training – 1
Armed Security Guard Training – 1
Security Officer Training – 1
Security Guard Classes – 1
Security Guard Job Description – 2
Security Guard Equipment – 2
How to Become a Security Guard – 7
Guard Card – 23
Guard Card is a highly competitive keyword that I’ve recently started putting an effort into ranking for using THE Backlinking Strategy that Works, and I’ve already seen some major progress. A month ago I wasn’t even on the radar, and now I’m at 23.

If I can break the top 3 this will result in a huge increase in (highly targeted) traffic, and there are a lot of online courses with affiliate programs specifically for obtaining a guard card, which is a California specific security guard requirement.

Of course, I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

This may be a coincidence, but ever since the design update I’ve noticed a brand new keyword that has been driving new traffic to the site:

Security Guard

Yep – plain ol’ “security guard”.

It has about 14 times as many monthly global searches than my primary keyword, security guard training, and although the traffic is less targeted for what my website is about (i.e., people may be searching for security guard companies to hire instead of training information), it may present an opportunity to expand what my website includes in the future.

Investigating My 275% Increase in Adsense Revenue

My security guard training niche site from the Niche Site Duel has been sitting at number one in Google for a little over 2 months now. As January comes to an end, I’ve already passed the $400 mark in revenue for the month (from Google Adsense) – a 275% increase from December, and there are still 5 days left to go.

This drastic increase in earnings actually caught me by surprise – so I decided to do a little investigating to see where this extra income was coming from.

What I found out surprised me even more.

THE POWER OF LONG-TAIL NON-TARGET KEYWORD

My first hunch told me to check my stats from Google Adsense.

Were there more clicks than last month?

Yes, of course.

Was there a higher click-through rate?

Nope! It was virtually the same as last month. So, this means that I had more traffic coming to the site (and obviously more impressions of my ad as a result, which was reflected in Adsense).

Google Analytics

Now that I knew I had more traffic, I wanted to figure out where it was all coming from. So that’s when I checked my Google Analytics account and noticed something very interesting.

Here is a snapshot of my traffic and keyword analysis for December (about 60 days to 30 days ago):

Note that my target keyword, security guard training, accounted for about 62.88% of the search engine traffic coming to my site (total: 2,228 hits).

Now, let’s check out my results for the month of January, or about 30 days ago until present:

There was an increase in search engine hits, however my target keyword this month only accounted for 52.35% of search engine traffic, even though there were basically the same amount of hits (total: 2,263 – only a 1.5% difference). This means that 47.65% of my total search engine traffic, which amounts to 2,060 hits, came from keywords that are not my target keyword, and to be honest most of them are not even keywords I would have even thought of as secondary or tertiary keywords for this niche.

Here are some examples of some of the long-tail keywords that people are finding me with:

Notice that each one of these long-tail terms accounts for only one visit. That’s not anything spectacular unless you understand that there are thousands of these long-tail terms that drive traffic to my site. Like I said, these accounted for about 47%, or 2000 hits from search engines during the last 30 days, which is pretty amazing to think about. This is why, I believe I saw such a large increase in Adsense revenue over the past month. I’m guessing Google just happened to find my content relevant to these searches fairly recently.