I haven’t posted here in a few days because I’ve embarked on a major SEO project that’s more challenging then anything I’ve ever attempted before.

You see, I have this little old eCommerce site. It wasn’t always so little, in-fact it’s one of the first sites I ever developed (I said it was old) and for years was the financial foundation that supported my business. My earnings from this site in the past allowed me to branch out and tinker in interesting directions that have all led me to where I am today.

However, over the past couple years as the rest of my business grew I’ve allowed this eCommerce site to fade into oblivion because my attentions were focused elsewhere, and for a while I was even considering selling the site so that someone else who would give it the TLC it requires could benefit from it; but since it was one of my first web sites there’s a sentimental attachment that ultimately prevented me from selling.

How far has this site fallen? Let’s just look at the month of September revenue over the past 4 years to show the trend-line (numbers rounded to nearest dollar):

• Sept. 2004 = $13,421
• Sept. 2005 = $11,632
• Sept. 2006 = $6,310
• Sept. 2007 = $0 (so far)

How ugly is that?

To be honest, the downward trend hasn’t been as drastic as those numbers make it appear. Just looking at a single month from each year shows the trend in large steps, however on a month to month basis it’s really been more of a steady, but slow decline. Until last year when I all but stopped putting any time into the site, and then this year when the bottom really fell out.

The reason is simple, my site, which was optimized for search engines 4 years ago is completely non-optimized for them today and doesn’t appear in the top 100 for any of its keywords on Google, Yahoo or MSN. In 2004 it had top 10 rankings for all of those terms though.

A note of interest: I’ve never done anything other than build organic traffic through search engines for this site. From day one I never invested a single penny in online advertising or PPC, and there’s no email list involved. The traffic and revenue has always been from strictly hard (and smart) work.

So what’s the big deal? A little tweaking and adjusting to re-optimize the pages should be all it takes right? It’s an aged site with a solid history of good SERPs performance, this should be easy; shouldn’t it?

But, the genre this site is in has exploded over the past few years, primarily with affiliate and drop-shipping programs being introduced, and where my site used to be one of just a couple dozen in the early years, I now face thousands of competitors out there. Maybe it won’t be as easy as I was thinking…

Still, the traffic for my top keywords has also grown. Where the #1 position on Google for my main keyword used to bring me a couple hundred visitors per day, that same spot probably gets several thousand daily visitors now. Years ago it wasn’t possible to track how many daily searches a term was getting, but today there are some great tools that while not exact, do give webmasters a fairly accurate measuring of search volumes.

Google Trends is helpful, and in conjunction with some other tools tells me that my main term is currently getting around 50,000 daily searches, and that is about 10 times as much as it was getting back in September of 2004 according to the data.

A look at the challenge I’m facing:

1. Google says I have about 65 million competitors for my main keyword
2. Yahoo thinks I have about 75 million competitors

Deeper research into the competition tells me that:

1. There’s actually about 2 million serious competitors on Google for the term
2. There’s really about 3 million serious competitors on Yahoo for the term

While the deeper research numbers are more promising, that’s still a lot of competition to be up against. So, given how well I do with the rest of my business and the fact that my desire to revive this web site is more out of nostalgia and sentimental attachment than anything else–I had to make a decision because to do this is going to require a lot of time and hard work.

The choice was a no-brainer. Of-course I’m going to take on the challenge!

First, it’s always good to add to your earnings, and I know that this site (and market) is a money making beast when the traffic is flowing. At one point I was valuing every single visitor at being worth over $6 to me in earnings. That’s not just the visitors who made purchases, that’s the total monthly earnings divided by total number of monthly unique visitors being over $6.

Second, there’s nothing like a really hard challenge to fine-tune and sharpen your skills; which is beneficial to the rest of my business as well as with this one site. Since I’m going to focus on doing what I’ve always done with this site–meaning no PPC or other paid advertising methods–and the competition is so high this should be a good way for me to really get down and dirty with current SEO techniques.

And last… bragging rights. When I compiled all of the data on my terms and competition I shared the findings with 2 good friends who also run successful online businesses and they both shouted “Don’t do it! You’re wasting your time!” — Of course, they don’t know just how well this site (and the products it sells) connects and converts with visitors, so I have a leg up on them in that respect, and if I can increase the SERPs for my main terms to get them back in the top 20 even (though top 10’s would be much better) I’ll be the one doing the shouting… and the celebratory “Happy Dance” in front of them.

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Also See:

• My Google Reader Shares – November 18, 2009
• What would you do with a dollar?
• 1 Part Developer, 1 Part Marketer, 1 Part Domainer-Shaken and Stirred
• Mini-Site Flipping

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 11:13 am and is filed under Business, SEO, eCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.