Ranking A Niche Site to Number 1 on Google With $0 – Case Study

Want to rank a website with $0 investment into SEO? Here’s how I achieve it.

I’m going to share with you the steps of how my team at AccuWP build and grow a niche eCommerce website and rank it top on Google.

From this case study, you will learn how to:

• Find high volume and low competition niches
• Build and maintain the site with ZERO ongoing costs
• Build backlinks with $0

The Challenge

I had been selling automatic watch winders for the longest time. Unfortunately, as the market shifts and more competitors join the marketplaces like Qoo10, Shopee and Lazada, I had to start looking for a new avenue to sell.

Busy like a bee, I had actually set up the website a year prior but did nothing to it and only started working on it about 6-7 weeks ago. However, rest assured, I will even share the process of finding niches.

P.S: I DIDN’T EVEN ENABLE PAYMENTS!

Finding a Niche

While the niche has already been chosen, what I usually do to find new niches is to dig into the best selling list of Amazon, Taobao or Qoo10 and find unique ideas that would likely have low competition.

However, with today’s technology, you can use tools like Affiliate Corner or FindNiche to find ideas that you can build a site around for affiliate marketing or eCommerce. In my case, I very much prefer the eCommerce model as you can control the business and set high margins. With affiliate marketing, while there is no inventory cost, the commissions are usually low and affiliate compensation plans can change.

Create a Business with $0 Recurring Cost

This is one of my special skills when it comes to starting online business. Ever heard of Kickstarter? Well, this is somewhat similar. Software companies today, uses a model called lifetime deals to raise money for software development or marketing to grow their business.

Software today such as Ahrefs, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign are recurring expenses, and by providing you a unique opportunity to get in early and reap the benefits, lifetime deals are highly enticing. Lifetime deals are software that you purchase (or only pay once) and use for life. However, most lifetime deals usually only run for a limited time, early in their development. You get a premature software and pay a higher amount up front, but only once, and get to benefit as the software develops and progress.

Check out websites like Pitchground, Dealmirror, Appsumo and even in the DecisiveMarketer community where we run lifetime deals. However, you will need to check back often, so that you can get your hands on the right tools you need.

Thankfully, I have already equipped myself with the right tools for this.

Tools to Build the Website

You will need these tools:

• Kadence
• EWWW Image Optimizer
• ShortPixel
• SquirrlySEO Pro
• Convertful
• Vbout
• WPVivid Pro
• pCloud
• WPCodeBox

Kadence

Kadence is the best WooCommerce theme and plugin because it comes with a highly customizable theme, Gutenberg addons plugin as well as a WooCommerce addons plugin called Shop Kit.

I highly recommend everyone to only build WooCommerce websites using Gutenberg Blocks moving forward because WooCommerce is such a heavy plugin, when combined with a page builder such as Elementor or Zion Builder, it really chalks up the page requests and slows down the load speed.

With the pro version of the theme as well the Shop Kit plugin, you can also consolidate and reduce a number of plugins on your WooCommerce site, making it much more manageable.

EWWW Image Optimizer

While the name says image optimizer, I do not actually use it for image optimization. I use ShortPixel for that purpose (more on that later).

EWWW Image Optimizer is hands down, the best value plugin for optimizing your website load speed. It comes with CDN (powered by Bunny.net), caching, script management as well as image optimization (duh!).

When purchased separately such as with WPRocket, Imagify and RocketCDN, it will cost you a bomb, with less features.

ShortPixel

The reason why I do not use EWWW Image Optimizer for image optimization is because ShortPixel does a better job. In fact, I think ShortPixel might be the best image optimization plugin out there.

ShortPixel does come with an image CDN but I highly recommend you use EWWW Image Optimizer for the Bunny.net CDN instead.

SquirrlySEO Pro

SquirrlySEO Pro is an alternative to Rank Math Pro and SEOPress Pro. While it lacks certain features against the other 2, SquirrlySEO is definitely still a step up against Yoast SEO free. Of course, the lifetime deal makes it very valuable.

Convertful

This is an alternative to OptinMonster. The script is super light and fast loading, and it has a couple of interesting features for eCommerce such as spin the wheel. Once again, no recurring cost is the focus here.

Vbout

Email marketing should be 30% of your overall revenue. However, people don’t tell you that Klaviyo costs 50% of your profits!

Email marketing tools with powerful eCommerce features are highly costly today, because most of them charge based on number of emails sent per month rather than in the past where they only charge you based on number of contacts.

Thankfully, I have Vbout on a lifetime license as Vbout is the closest SMTP included alternative to Klaviyo you can ever find on LTD.

WPVivid Pro

The must have of all backup plugins. WPVivid Pro is a backup, staging, image optimization and database merging plugin. I only use it for the backup function. WPVivid Pro stands out because of the price and it’s also on ongoing lifetime deal.

Get WPVivid Pro at 25% off! Use Code DECISIVEMARKETER

pCloud

The best combo you can have is combining WPVivid Pro with pCloud due to their native integrations with each other. With WPVivid Pro, you can automatically schedule your backups and store them on pCloud. While pCloud being the only cloud storage drive that is available on ongoing lifetime deal, you will never have to manually backup your website and never having to pay for them on recurring expense anymore.

Get pCloud for a one-time fee!

WPCodeBox

I like to use WPCodeBox to install and manage my tracking scripts such as Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. It is also great for adding 3rd party tracking scripts, chat widgets and more especially with the cloud-based library, you can save your snippets and install them on other sites easily.

Build Free Backlinks Fast

Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factor SEO. However, acquiring links is not exactly the easiest thing to do.

One of the most common methods of building backlinks is through guest posts. This process involves you submitting a post to a website that contents a link back to you. You provide a piece of content in exchange for a link. This process can be tedious because you have to provide a piece of content.

However, with the rise of AI writing tools such as GoCharlie, you can use it to generate a full blog in matter of minutes and submit it.

All you need to do next, is to scour the internet for websites that would accept your guest posts without a fee.

I have detailed my process on how to do so in this video.

Through this method on continuously building backlinks over a period of 6-7 weeks, I was able to rank my site to the top for multiple keywords. Check out the traffic increase in the screenshot below.

Moving Forward

The site is now consistently doing 4 figures of revenue per month and bringing in a good passive part time income. Maximising the profitability of this site will be my primary goal.

While the site is highly ranked already, there are some smaller volume keywords that can still be moved up for more traffic. The process of building free backlinks will continue until I have most of the important keywords ranked.

I will also be adding additional products such as watch boxes and cleaning accessories to increase the revenue.

Conclusion

SEO has consistently been delivering passive income streams into my bank account by bringing in free traffic and customers to my website. Whenever I search on Google for my keywords and seeing how much website has moved up the search results, it motivates me and reaffirms that SEO is still one of the most profitable traffic sources.

If you are starting a new business, selecting the right niche with low competition in the SERPs can literally get you results in less than 2 months.