New site, SEO well considered, no traffic :/ What next?

[whatphone]

Hi There!

We've built whatphone.com.au with SEO at the top of the list but things are not going as expected.

Yes, there's still a lot of work to do, but I was hoping to get some guidance on what to do next to make sure we keep the right focus.

This is what we've done to date:

• Added lots of unique and relevant content, particularly to our blog (and will continue to do so on a weekly basis)

• Ensured internal linking is strong

• Optimised each product page around product name (and relevant internal links pointing to it)

• Ensured the code is clean (ok, we are not a 100% but in a good place)

• URL structure, metadata, page titles, file names and alt tags following best practice

• Named the company and registered our domain around one of main keywords we are currently targeting "what phone"

What we're working on:

• Link building

• Site speed

• Social signals

• Rich media (videos, more images)

Not a bad effort right? No love from an organic traffic perspective Ok, the site / domain is no older than 2 months old, it's a very competitive industry, and no inbound links yet, but come on!

Questions:

• Are there any benefits of engaging external providers to help with link building? I'm talking about outsourcing from elancer or similar.. Or is this playing with fire?

• Have we missed something obvious here?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

PS: we currently have some issues with our pricing tables, but will fixed as soon as possible..

[Marcus_Miller]

A quick look at the SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool tells us that is a 68% - Highly Competitive search term and you are just not going to rank a new site for that term overnight.

This is not a perfect science but just take a look at some of the commercial sites that do rank

• 500 linking domains, 100 linking domains to the page itself

This is the kind of ballpark you are working in and you are just not going to do that overnight.

You need to look at a long term strategy, start with long, long tail and work backwards over time - this kind of thing:

what phone to replace htc desire
what phone for an old age pensioner

Then when you have this kind of level dialled in come back a notch in terms of competitive keywords and slowly but surely (over a year or so) work towards your bigger terms.

Also, remember, phrases like 'what phone', it probably shows big numbers but just how good a term is that? What is someone looking for? An informative breakdown of which phones are around maybe? Maybe you could do that and provide a truly authoritative look at the phones around and update it each qtr on your site.

Look to become known for your content, seed it out in other ways, be the best possible result for 'what phone' and keep your eye on the prize and you will get there but.... it's going to take time and effort and some content smarts.

Oh, and don't buy cheap links, that's just going to smash this ship into the rocks before you even leave the port!

Hope this helps

Marcus

[zeepartner]

Even if this might not be a very helpful comment.... but that's the experience I've made every time. Unless we have some coverage from major media sources it always took a minimum of 3 months, but up to one year until we got some decent traffic to our site. So I don't think it's that you're doing something wrong, it's just the name of the game..

As you say, it's a competitive business, and unless you get some great link magnets on your site, Adwords might be the way to go for starters. Oh, and of course looking for niches in the long tail.

[MoosaHemani]

I think you are playing safe till now... depending on your link building, content marketing and Social Media efforts you can measure the time and impact of your success.

I think asking out for outsourcing is great unless you know that service provide is going to help you instead of getting a shit out of the money you are investing.

I recommend you to go for a freelancer or company who have a good name or have done something for community... and have good idea for your company to work on...

Keep that in mind if all idea they have is directory submissions and article submissions and Yahoo answers then you are wasting your time indeed!

[rec123]

For new websites, Google imposes a "sandbox" penalty so it will be at least a few months before you can rank competitively for keywords. Read more here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom