Our business grew from a hobby in our garage, shipping a few top bar hives per month in December 2009, to a full-fledged, alternative beekeeping supplier in March 2010, shipping more than 4 dozen hives monthly, almost entirely due to Search Engine Optimization and Google Ads. Alternative beekeeping — top bar beekeeping in particular — is a niche market, with many options for a simple, cost-effective search marketing campaign. Making use of a technical background, a minimal ability to perform SEO on our Joomla-driven website, and some glaring failures by the competition in our SEO market, we were able to quadruple sales with an investment of less than $150 per month.

We started with a Google Ad budget of $50 per month in conjunction with Google Analytics, monitoring the results and adjusting the ads accordingly. During that time we also began researching SEO and tweaking our website to improve our SERP for our most important search terms. We chose very specific search terms in order to improve our conversion rate and reduce wasted ad clicks. At the same time, we also began making helpful posts on relevant blogs and forums, as well as working with related sites to swap links. The results came quickly, as we saw our Pagerank rise from 1 to 4 in a matter of only a few months. By March we were seeing over 6,000 unique visitors per month.

Today the competition is increasing, but our early and continued foray into SEO continues to give us the edge over competitors. While we’ve been busy the past few months, we cannot stress enough the importance of fresh content through blog posts, and outreach through Facebook, Twitter and other marketing avenues. We monitor daily our most important search terms through Google Alerts, and work diligently to stay current with trends in our industry and the campaigns of our competition. As traffic, sales and our ad budget increase proportionately, we continue to monitor our Google Ads, SERP, and content to ensure there are no issues.

At the same time that we are running an online campaign, we are beginning to focus more on local advertising through numerous avenues, and it is paying off. A combination of word-of-mouth, donations to sustainability-focused non-profits and locally targeted Google Ads have shown an overwhelming increase in local interest. It has been an interesting and amazing jump from a small online store to a viable business that is beginning to ponder the idea of a brick and mortar storefront.

Thanks to a little elbow grease, a monthly-coffee-budget-worth of Google Ads and some Search Engine Optimization, we believe Bee Thinking will grow to be a significant portion of our family’s income, if not our sole income in the next couple years!

Matt Reed
Bee Thinking

Any good SEO knows the number one rule of research, “don’t tip your hand.”  I feel this news is less of a secret method or technique, and more of a verification that Google is headed in a specific direction with search.  Plus, we have been using this method for a while now, and I would hope that every website applies this method where it makes sense.

How to Get a Jump-To Link in Google Results

If you visit the page directly you will find a table of contents, which links to anchor tags farther down on the page.  Notice the use of keywords in question format for the hash link.

Farther down the page, name="Is_there_a_multiplayer_mode.3f" shows up in an anchor tag.  This is where the page will load when linked to directly.  By using keywords in the anchor name, and having a link at the top of the page for engines and people to follow, the site is clearly showing that various parts of the page have various question answer combos, or more generally a table of contents.

Tips for Ranking Hash Links in Google

First, I would recommend checking out Googles advice on hash linking.

Second, make sure your pages are semantic.  Properly use your H-n level tags to create good page structure.

Don’t keyword stuff the content.  It is easy to be overzealous when creating titles and subtitles.  Stay away from keyword stuffing!

Create a table of contents at the top of the page and also at the bottom (if its a long page).   I have seen some people make the table of contents slide with the scrolling of the page.  If done right, it can be pretty nice.

Link to the page with hashmarks when it makes sense.  If you are referring to a specific section of the page, use hashmarks to direct the browser directly to that section.  I wouldn’t recommend doing this with aggressive link building, as it may trip a filter, but I do recommend hash linking when it makes sense.

FAQ SEO – One Page per Question or One Page per Topic

A few years ago, I was tasked with creating the SEO plan for a regional clinic.  One of the goals of the site was to rank on some long tail FAQ questions about various procedures.  At the time, long tail wordpress posts seemed to be the key to ranking for specific key phrases.  As a result, one topic with 20 questions would have required 20 individule pages.  The benefit of which is that you can really focus on the keywords in the URL and titles of each post for each question.  This allowed smaller, beginning websites to rank for specific long tail terms with very little page authority or link building.

The downside to building multiple pages is that your pages can become a bear to manage, and category pages were then linking to 20 pagers per topic (think watered down link authority).

As a result, I decided to create a single FAQ page for each topic and use hash anchors and hash links for navigation of the long pages.  The pages preformed fairly well, although we had no control to compare to ranking speed.  This method did require some creative link building to rank for competative terms; however, it is much easier to build the authority of a single page than of twenty.

Semantic Microformat Markup and SEO – hCards and vCards

Use semantic markup, even if it doesn’t have any proven direct ranking value right now.   For instance, to date, Google is not using hCard information in its search results, but I still recommend using hCard in SEO campaigns. It doens’t hurt, and nothing feels better than informing your client that the latest Google change puts their website ahead automatically and with no extra work.  Check out this site on microformat markup if you want to dive deeper into microformats.

Also, I would like to thank Andrew Murphy and Juston Johnson (Justin is also a Principal here at Zebra Kick).  Justin and Andrew taught me the importance of semantic markup a few years ago, and were deadset on making pages as semantic as possible.  Thanks guys!

Finally, what semantic tricks do you use on your pages that you don’t see often elsewhere?  Do you have pages that outpreform competition based partially on better markup?  I’d love to know.