Why Don’t You Rank Number 1 For ‘Car Insurance’?

At some point during your internet marketing journey, you may feel yourself wanting to ask an SEO (search engine optimisation) company or someone who teaches SEO the question:

“Why If you know so much about SEO, don’t you just build a website get it ranked no.1 for an extremely lucrative keyword such as ‘loans’ ‘car insurance’ or ‘real estate and sit back and count the money?”

After all, you may be thinking if a person or company claims to know so much about SEO surely they would be ranking for these types of keywords and surely they would be making a lot of money. This is an entirely logical thought and one I had when I first started to learn internet marketing.

In fact many of you reading this blog maybe thinking, why if I claim to know a lot about SEO don’t I get this blog ranked no.1 for the keyword (s) ‘Make Money Online’?

My answer to this is simple –

‘The fact that I do understand search engine optimisation is precisely the reason why I don’t try to rank this blog for a keyword (s) such as ‘make money online’.

Let me explain:

I feel I know enough about search engine optimisation to understand the time, money, effort and difficulty it would take to rank for a keyword such as ‘make money online’. Furthermore if I ran an SEO company and a client asked whether I could rank his website no1 for ‘car insurance’, I would advise that while with enough time and money I probably could, it would be far better to choose some other keywords to rank for with less competition.

I have mentioned that SEO is not complicated. There are only 2 elements to work on ‘On page SEO’ and ‘Off Page SEO’. On Page SEO is the practise of optimising elements such as the meta-tags, the h1 tags, the keyword density and the internal linking structure. On page SEO is easy and can be done relatively quickly. Once you have optimised a page for a certain keyword there isn’t much more you can do. Off Page SEO is the practise of building backlinks to your site. These can either be got organically, where other people are so impressed with the content on your site that they link back to you naturally. Or they can be obtained building the links yourself. It is also my opinion that Off Page SEO accounts for about 80% of search engine optimisation**

**If anybody wants to challenge this then please let me know. I would love to have a competition with someone else. We will target exactly the same keyword. You build a web page that is perfectly optimised on the page and do a tiny amount of link building. I will build a page that has minimal Onpage optimisation; however I will aggressively build backlinks to it. Let’s see which one ranks the highest…

If we understand SEO and understand how backlinks play such an important part in where a website ranks, then we can understand why it would be foolish when starting out to try and rank for a keyword such as ‘car insurance’.

As an example let me type the keyword ‘Car Insurance’ into Google, and let us have a look at the top 10 results. We can also use Yahoo Site Explorer to get an idea*** about the amount of backlinks these 10 websites have pointing to them.

***I say idea because it is my opinion that no search engine is ever going to reveal the precise number of backlinks a website has pointing to it. Otherwise we could essentially ‘reverse engineer’ its algorithm. For more detailed information please check out this excellent blog post from the team at Free Traffic System.

Keyword: ‘Car Insurance’

SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) Backlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer

1. www.confused.com 43,505
2. www.moneysupermarket.com/motor 226,687
3. www.comparethemarket.com 19,343
4. www.directline.com 86,852
5. www.aviva.co.uk 19,622
6. www.tescofinance.com 10,170
7. www.churchill.com 11,287
8. www.theaa.com 122,656
9. www.esure.com 6,979
10. www.gocompare.com 3,823

This quick experiment gives us some idea of the amount of work involved in trying to out-rank one of these companies. Just think how long it would take you to build 20,000 backlinks. Also remember that I don’t even believe that these are the exact figures anyway. It is likely that each one of these sites has 1,000’s more backlinks that aren’t even showing.

Furthermore I don’t have time to analyse every backlink for each different company, however you can be certain that a portion of those backlinks will come from some extremely high authority sites which will pass more SEO value. This is a topic in itself, however I am certain that some links pass more SEO value or link juice than others. While there are some SEO companies that can help try to get high value links and there are some tricks you can use to do this, in general it is far harder to manually obtain extremely high value links. E.G. I can’t just ring up the BBC or CNN and request that they give me a nice backlink with the anchor text that I desire!

So if we were doing some market research into the chances of ranking for highly for ‘Car Insurance’, we could conclude the following.

1.The sites ranking for these keywords have thousands or backlinks pointing to them.
2.That a portion of those backlinks are from extremely trusted and high authority sites.
3.Furthermore we can also see that websites ranking for the keyword car insurance are multi million pound companies, meaning that they can pay teams of SEO employees to work on constantly keeping their sites high up the rankings.

Thousands of backlinks, some from high authority sites with companies that have millions of pounds to spend on SEO = extremely hard time for us ranking.

As mentioned the amount of time money and effort involved in this is going to be immense. If you are just starting out in internet marketing you would be making a big mistake trying to do this. Not because you don’t have enough knowledge about SEO to know how to do this, it is because you know enough to realise the pointless waste of your time it would be.

So if in the future anybody challenges your knowledge of SEO and ask why you don’t rank no1 for ‘loans’ or ‘Mortgages’ then simply reply, it’s because you do know enough about SEO to know it would be a waste of time (initially at least, after you’ve made your first million on the internet then you can employ a team of SEO workers to target these keywords!)

So What Keywords Do You Target?

Unfortunately you are going to have to wait for another blog post, however I can tell you know that keyword research is the most element of any precise internet marketing strategy. If you get those wrong then your journey is doomed from the start.

Luckily for you I am going to give me opinion on selecting the right keywords. Making sure that you choose keywords that have relatively small competition but nice stable monthly search demand.

To your massive success.

Guy

P.S. If you liked this post then please link to me.