#2 on Google!
Thursday, August 9th, 2007Hey! I guess S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) works! We finally worked our way up to the #2 spot on Google for the key word “kettle corn”. Now we just have to push past wikipedia. So what’s the big deal you ask? Plenty.
I got the big idea to start selling kettle corn online about a year ago. The easy way is to just list an item on ebay and rake in the money. (How many people buy stuff on ebay? Millions. We’re gonna be rich-SOMEBODY wants kettle corn out there..right? Wrong. Hardly anyone bothered to look at the listing. The posting fees were also kinda steep just for a $4 item.
I noticed that thousands of people a month were searching on Google for kettle corn. How do I know this? Certain websites like Seobook will tell you how often a search term or keyword is entered in Google. As an example: the keyword “kettle corn” normally gets 5,280 searches a month. That’s cool. Not as much as say…the keywords “online gambling”, but an OK amount.
You’ve probably noticed that it’s tough to get a high listing on Google. Sure, if you know exactly WHO you want, their web page will appear on top of your search, but if you’re not sure of WHAT you want for something like kettle corn, there are many people wanting to sell you it on the web. Right now it says that there are 1,240,000 web pages with the words “kettle corn” on them. Since most people don’t bother to click beyond the first few links, you must get “up there” to be noticed.
How do you get a good listing on Google? Two ways: pay for a good spot (i.e. the Sponsored links) or have a popular website. Certain S.E.O. Websites will tell you what the going rate is to have the top spot on Google for you keyword. I know that North Bend Originals (the same kettle I have) is paying over $2 A CLICK to be listed as the top one. There is now way I’m going to pay $2 a click to sell a $4 bag of kettle corn.
What makes a website seem popular to Google? Links! If other people are linking to your website, Google thinks that you must be important. Especially if they are putting your keyword in their link back to you. This is when I started giving out free sample bags of kettle corn to anyone who would give me a link. I’ve now sent out almost 300 sample bags of kettle corn for the same amount of links. The best spot on a Google search page is not the area where the paid spots are but the top of the free Google suggestions. We’re right now at the second best spot AND we are above all the other vendors! Woo hoo!
At this point online sales is OK. I’d say we do about 12-16 bags a week. (3-4 orders) I’ve noticed certain people across America are REALLY into kettle corn and have started to re-order on an almost weekly basis. I figure once I’ve attracted the attention of enough of them, I’ll be all set!
