#2 in Google in 4 Weeks: Case Study

Couple of weeks ago I started ranking for some coupon niche keywords in the hosting niche. I got some great results, both financial and from an SEO stand point. Since I never done this for the money but only for the sake of SEO I will share all my SEO strategies and reveal all the keywords I rank for.



Keywords: Arvixe coupon, Arvixe coupon code, Arvixe promo, Arvixe promo code, Arvixe coupon codes.

Current position in Google: #2

major competitors:

RetailMeNot.com ($147.4 million in revenue for 2012 according to Wikipedia)

Coupons.com (valued at $1 billion or more by venture-capital firms)


My site: BlogMakingSchool.com (1 year old, 31DA, no PR )

On Site SEO

My BlogMakingSchool site was never relevant to Arvixe nor to coupon codes. To solve this problem here's what I did:

1. I changed the site title in: "BlogMakingSchool - Hosting Coupons & Reviews".

2. I created a "coupon codes" category that I included in the navigation menu.

3. I added 3 articles relevant to "Arvixe coupon codes" and "Arvixe discount".

4. I included a link to my main article in the sidebar.

On Page SEO

The funny thing here is that I never included any of my main keywords in the content of my article. I used Google Adwords to locate all the keywords that were relevant to "Arvixe coupon" and used them instead.

Where I really put my efforts on was the html code complexity and and the vertical pixel size of the article.

Here are some of the things I needed to do:

1. Include my main keyword in the url.
2. Include my main keyword in the title.
3. Write over 500 words keyword relevant content.
4. Make sure that the the vertical size of the article was large.
5. Create html class divs for every coupon code I inserted in the article.


Link Building

If you check the backlink profile of my article you'll see a lot of "negative SEO backlinks" made by my competitors. They're loosing a lot of profits because of me so they're desperately trying to wipe out of the SERP's.

The links that I build were 110 in total. Here's the amount, variety and type of backlinks I've build:

20 x high PR guest post article links
10 x web 2.0 links
30 x blogroll links
30 x social links
5 x pdf article links
5 x press release links
10 x nofollow comment links

Here's the anchor text density I used:

70% - naked link
5% - arvixe coupon on BlogMakingSchool
5% - arvixe coupon
5% - arvixe coupon code
5% - arvixe promo code
5% - arvixe coupons
5% - use this coupon, here (natural anchor text)

Brand Mentions

When distributing the content among different high PR sites I made sure to mention my domain name once in the article title and once in the article content. Most of my titles would look like this: "BlogMakingSchool releases new Arvixe Coupons".

Google's highest relevancy factor is the title of an article. By mentioning my domain name next to "Arvixe coupon" in different headings I strongly associated my domain name with this company.

I also did a Google + post sharing campaign using this same strategy.

Tier 2 & My SEO Secret

Here's my little SEO secret:

Every url that shows in the SERP's has an algorithmic score. Highest the score, higher you rank.

The results from the first 5 pages showing up for "Arvixe coupon" have higher score than the rest of the neighborhood.

Having 2 links pointing to your article from page 5 gives you higher score than 5 links from page 15.

There are also other factors that bring some extra points to the score. Few of them are number of links, domain age, PR, content quantity and so on.

To speed up the ranking process I worked hard on bringing most of my High PR backlink articles before page 5 in the SERP's for the "arvixe coupon" keyword.


I really hope this post will guide you on your next SEO quest. If it happens that you use my strategy please don't forget to share your results with the rest of us.