Let’s not forget organic rankings!
Well I just got an interesting surprise.
I’m sitting here at Yanik Silver’s Underground 4 conference in Los Angeles, and the speaker is talking about “buzz marketing” which is essentially about using blogs and social media to get organic rankings and traffic.
OK so, not a new concept in general… but it reminded me to check something that I hadn’t looked at in a couple of months.
When I launched LPGen, I thought it would be cool to rank #1 in Google for the phrase “landing page generator” (without the quotes of course). Initially, I didn’t rank anywhere for anything. But I put the site up, and put “Landing Page Generator” in the title of the page. That’s damn near the only SEO I even did. I know a lot of SEO techniques but I rarely apply them and don’t fancy myself an SEO expert.
So a couple months passed, and I was on the front page of Google, towards the bottom, for my target phrase. Pretty cool… but not where I wanted to be. Still, I did nothing in terms of SEO. I left the page alone, made an occasional blog post here, but that’s it. No social marketing, no backlink gathering campaigns, etc.
Well another month or two went by, and I was in like #4, without having done a thing.
I promptly forgot about it until right now when the speaker said something that reminded me of it. So I hopped over to Google and searched…
And I’ll be damned - I’m in the #1 position. Not only that, I’m #1 in Yahoo and MSN too. In fact I’m #1 (through DealDotCom) and #2 in Yahoo.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is getting me massive floods of traffic that are making me a multi millionaire over again every week. Far from it, it’s not exactly a high traffic phrase. BUT… it has reminded me that, even in a world of lots of sources of cheap and flexible paid traffic, I really need to not forget about the organic stuff. Top rankings can be achieved without even doing much work in many cases.
I needed this reminder…