As you know, I recently started a new passive income business that went from conception to launch in just one month.

In my last article I briefly mentioned how I was able to start getting some great organic search results (that means free traffic from search engines that I don’t have to pay for!). I’d like to share with you today how I did that.

The Power Of Having Keywords In Your Domain Name

From prior experience I knew the power of having keywords in your domain name. For example this site ranked #1 in Google for my primary keyword “houston finance tutor” and “finance tutor houston” in just 20 days with ZERO other marketing. The only reason it ranked there was because my keywords were in the domain name: houstonfinancetutor.com.

Following this same logic, I launched the new tutoring site with a separate domain for each region. Here are some of the ones I chose:

• www.austin-tutor.com
• www.new-york-tutor.com
• www.tutors-boston.com
• www.philadelphia-tutor.com

It’s worth noting here that each site had separate content and separate tutors on it. If you are thinking of duplicating your site across multiple domains to rank in search engines, don’t do it. It won’t work because search engines are pretty good at detecting duplicate content. They will just pick one copy and discard the rest. But that wasn’t the case here….I had separate tutors on each site generating separate content.

I chose these domains after using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see what people were searching for. As expected, many people living in a particular city were doing “regional” searches for a tutor. In other words, they were including their city name in the search as opposed to entering a generic term like “algebra tutor”.

The “regional” searches were much less competitive terms to rank for on Google, so I figured I had a good shot of getting on the first page of Google for some of those terms.

How did it work? Pretty well.

Within a week or two I was getting first page Google listings for some of the less competitive keywords like “biology tutor austin” or “latin tutor austin”. If you know anything about search engine optimization, then you know for a brand new site to get first page listings in Google in a few weeks is pretty outstanding.

However, I was NOT yet getting on the first page for more competitive terms like “algebra tutor austin” (a more popular subject) or “austin tutor”.

There were also several other problems, most notably that I had to manage and market many separate sites now. I had to try and get incoming links to each one, register each one, set up my software to work with each one, etc. Plus they weren’t the most prestigious looking domains, given that they had hyphens in them.

Keywords In A Subdomain

For the reasons mentioned above I decided to combine all my sites into one domain: www.UniversityTutor.com

This would make it easier to manage, but then I would lose the benefit of having my keyword (city name) in the domain, right?

To fix that I decided to use regional subdomains just like houston.craigslist.com or houston.citysearch.com.

Now my domains would look like this:

• austin.universitytutor.com
• newyork.universitytutor.com
• boston.universitytutor.com
• philadelphia.universitytutor.com

Having a subdomain with your keyword in it doesn’t give you quite as big of a boost in search results as having a domain with your keyword, but it is still much better than not having it at all.

Plus I figured the other benefits of the new setup made up for anything that was lost: I would now have a professional looking domain without any hyphens, the domain had been around a long time and wasn’t “brand new” in Google’s eyes, and now all my marketing (and incoming links) could be directed to one site instead of being divided up.

Managing the Transition

I certainly didn’t want to lose all the rankings I’d already obtained with the old sites, so I had to manage the transition closely. A special thanks goes out to my friend Josh at Spot On SEO who shared some of his wisdom. He was great, so give him a call if you need any help with search engines.

It turns out you can use something called a “301 redirect” to tell Google (and other search engines) when you are moving to a new domain. It took some technical mumbo-jumbo, but I eventually got them set up correctly.

So how well did it work? Well I tracked the results, and here are my search engine rankings comparing the old sites (with separate domains) to the new site (using subdomains) after about two weeks. The dashes represent not ranking anywhere in the top 500.

By the way, the tool I used to track these is called Rank Checker. It’s a free Firefox plugin and I highly recommend it.

Keyword	Old Site’s Ranking	New Site’s Ranking
algebra tutor austin	28	19
austin tutor	86	45
austin tutoring	133	36
austin tutoring service	-	12
biology tutor austin	1	3
calculus tutor austin	16	5
english tutor austin	22	6
find a tutor in austin	2	9
math tutor austin	50	32
science tutor austin	1	7
tutors in austin	54	33
algebra tutor new york	-	106
new york tutor	-	96
new york tutoring	-	78
new york tutoring service	-	72
biology tutor new york	32	53
calculus tutor new york	-	61
english tutor new york	-	156
find a tutor in new york	7	43
math tutor new york	-	-
science tutor new york	-	89
tutors in new york	-	-
algebra tutor philadelphia	18	9
philadelphia tutor	36	56
philadelphia tutoring	114	64
philadelphia tutoring service	-	-
biology tutor philadelphia	8	3
calculus tutor philadelphia	15	5
english tutor philadelphia	32	20
find a tutor in philadelphia	1	15
math tutor philadelphia	48	12
science tutor philadelphia	19	8
tutors in philadelphia	112	65
algebra tutor boston	25	6
boston tutor	84	8
boston tutoring	134	34
boston tutoring service	141	-
biology tutor boston	1	10
calculus tutor boston	4	8
english tutor boston	48	16
find a tutor in boston	-	6
math tutor boston	61	13
science tutor boston	7	4
tutors in boston	79	34

Overall the trend was very positive and it was a great improvement in keyword rankings! I imagine many of the ones that did not improve will get picked up in the next week or two as Google catches the last of them.

Some Final Tweaks

Now that I was using subdomains, it meant I could expand to new cities much faster. I didn’t need to hunt for an available domain name for each one!

I now had an incredible opportunity. I had about 40 “subjects” in my database that someone might need a tutor in (everything from Chinese to organic chemistry). I then added about 1,000 cities into the database (along with about 2,000 universities that I could get tutors from). I actually entered these by hand, and yes it was a really boring experience. But hey, if you want to get ahead in life sometimes you have to make sacrifices!

I now had the potential to create a huge number of targeted pages.

Remember that my keywords generally followed the format of “[SUBJECT] tutor [CITY]” like “algebra tutor austin”. Well with 40 subjects and 1,000 cities, I could now create 40 x 1,000 = 40,000 potential keywords to rank for.

The beauty of the site is that THESE PAGES ARE CREATED AUTOMATICALLY when a new tutor signs up in a given city and chooses a subject.

• The title tag of the page is automatically generated to say “algebra tutor austin”
• An H1 tag, bold tag, etc is automatically generated to say “algebra tutor austin” somewhere on the page
• In addition, the URL comes out to be http://austin.universitytutor.com/algebra which contains all the keywords! “algebra”, “tutor”, and “austin”.

These are just a few of the things that search engines look at. If you want to see a more complete list of all the factors search engines look at to “rank” a page, check out this link.

Hopefully these factors will all come together to get some great search engine rankings across a very wide spectrum of pages as more tutors sign up. Currently there are 1,759 pages on the site and Google is still catching up, having only indexed 273 of them so far.

I’ve seen search engine traffic start to go up already, but I hope to be bringing in thousands of visitors per day (free!) from organic search results in the near future.

Conclusions

This may be a bit out there for some people, but hopefully it at least gives you an idea of what is possible, especially if you have a regional business. (Feel free to ask questions below, I’m sure I skipped some important details).

If you’re just getting started with a new site, I think the biggest thing you can take away is this: if you choose a domain (or subdomain) with your primary keyword in it, it can really help you rank for that term in search engines.

Finally I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been buying my book and sending in your kind words. I’m absolutely thrilled that you are finding it useful!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Want to get 3 of the top 10 books ever written on building wealth for FREE? Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man In Babylon, and The Way To Wealth are yours for free when you subscribe to get updates from StartBreakingFree.com!