Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

Not that I deserve to be grouped in the same league as Pareto or Chris Anderson, but I’ve developed a new ‘rule of thumb’ to help microbusinesses grow online, called the 3/30 rule of search engine marketing, which states:

In a market with less than 30000 competitors and approximately 3000 customers, there is potential for a Google number 1 ranking.

Let me explain. Suppose you sell cashmere scarves on your website, as one of my new clients does. A quick search on Google tells me that if my you also sell a ‘plaid cashmere scarf’ you will be competing against just 4930 companies for a Google number 1 ranking. And if your website is optimized efficiently, you can expect a large chunk of the 3600 people who search for and want to buy a ‘plaid cashmere scarf’ each month to at least visit your website. That’s not bad for just one product.

Now imagine you could optimize each page of your website for a specific long-tail, or niche keyword like ‘cashmere sweater v-neck’ (6600 searches a month with only 2650 competitors) or ‘black cashmere sweater’ (3600 searches a month with 21100 competitors). With 20 different product pages on your website all optimized effectively and ranking in Google’s top 3 results, you could expect to receive around 48000 visitors to your site each month.  Impressive!

How to research 3/30 niche markets

As with so many things in life, Google makes it easy to research 3/30 opportunities for niche markets.

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It’s been a while since I checked my Google PageRank and my Alexa traffic rankings, so I decided to have a little peek this morning.

My findings weren’t particularly interesting, but they did get me thinking about the state of my business.

First of all, what did Google and Alexa think?

It seems that Google doesn’t like me quite as much as it did a few months ago. My PR has dropped from an insignificant 3/10 to a paltry 2/10. Why I do not know; clearly I’ve done something to annoy the big G.

On the bright side, Alexa has upped my ranking from 2,216,056 (which is probably as low as any ranking could be) to 829,909 (still rubbish, but better).

Why?

I think there are a couple of good reasons why this has happened to me:

1. I’ve been messing around with my site a fair bit lately. I’ve had 2 site redesigns in the past 12 months, a change in the structure of the site’s content, and a hosting change a couple of months ago. Surely none of this can be helpful.
2. Google obviously doesn’t think much of the links I’ve been building to this site lately. Pity, but sometimes these things happen. Google PageRank is a completely worthless gauge of a website’s importance anyway, so I don’t really care.
3. Traffic to my blog has steadily been increasing over the past 3 months, so Alexa is right to notice my 362% increase in global reach. Of course, Alexa is just as worthless as Google at measuring website authority.

Why I don’t care about Google PR or Alexa

PageRank and Alexa rank are rubbish in my opinion, so what do I consider to be a good indication of my website’s performance this year?

1. More traffic (78% increase in the past 6 months).
2. More comments on my blog (but not enough. Get commenting!)
3. More return visitors (my bounce rate has dropped from a whopping 93% to 59%)
4. More sales leads (from less than 3 per month to between 5 and 8 per week).
5. A higher number of sales lead conversions (no data available, but something seems to be working).

On the whole I’d give my progress a 7/10 so far this year. I’ve fallen short of the goals I set myself but I’m not too disappointed. Besides, I’ve still got 2 months to go.

So that’s how I use a tiny bit of science and a huge dollop of gut feel to measure my online business performance. How do you measure yours?

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Following on from yesterday’s Local search engine marketing article, I thought you might be interested in reading a bit more on the topic, so I’ve compiled a couple of links for you:

Matt McGee’s Hyperlocal Blogging blog. Matt has put together a very detailed series of posts about hyperlocal blogging and his personal experiences. I can’t begin to tell you how envious I am that he’s managed to launch an entire blog about this fascinating topic.

Matt also points out these blog posts that have cropped up lately:

John Batelle’s case study on the Open Forum blog about the perils of not getting to grips with local search engine marketing. This makes for a really good read and applies to your business, whatever business you’re in.

If you feel like getting a little more involved in the nuts and bolts behind local search marketing, Dev Basu’s article about building landing pages that are optimized for local search is a good place to start.

I suspect that this topic is going to become more and more important in the coming months. So get reading before you miss out.

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