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Increase Your Search Rankings by Shrinking Your Offering
Anyone can sell nutritional supplements, and many do. However, what would you think would happen to a company that stripped everything away to focus on selling magnesium supplements?
Magnesium — not something you hear about everyday, huh? It’s not really the product with the most “sex appeal.” As Patrick Sullivan, co-founder of Jigsaw Health which focuses on selling these wonderful magnesium supplements, explains:
“Magnesium is involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body. It works in tandem with calcium — calcium flexes muscles, and magnesium relaxes them. Thus, muscle relaxation is one of the many benefits of magnesium. But you just don’t hear about magnesium as much as you hear about calcium. And no surprise, up to 80% of Americans are deficient in magnesium. We recognized a large void in the marketplace to make an uncool mineral, cool.”
Roy Williams consistently shares this piece of advice with business owners: those companies that try to appeal to everyone tend not to appeal to anyone. It pays to have a “sword in the stone.” Says Roy:
Advertisers rarely abandon campaigns that revolve around their Swords in the Stone. And sword campaigns tend to perform much better than those built merely upon clever ideas. A company’s Sword in the Stone embodies its core values and defines its essence, and from these flow their non-negotiable standards and their customers’ positive experiences.
Patrick Sullivan explains on his blog the 5 step process he went through to increase his search rankings for the main index page on Jigsaw Health for the term magnesium supplements. He shares his results too:
In about 4 days, Lord Google bumped us from outer-space to 27th for “magnesium supplements”. About 10 days later, we were the second listing on page 2 (position 12)!!
Today he is #11. Obviously, something is working.
Being this focused is not only good for Google but for your visitors as well. Sites that work to clarify their sword in the stone wind up with much lower bounce rates and, more importantly, increased sales and conversions. Just ask Patrick at Jigsaw, who finally put the magnesium pieces together.
[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]
About the author
Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark and Always Be Testing. Bryan is available as a professional speaker. You can friend him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter (@TheGrok).
More articles from Bryan Eisenberg
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August 25th, 2009
10:09 am
Very interesting matter, well made! Congratulations!
August 25th, 2009
2:21 pm
Well done! Just for a day, there’s another improvement in his site. But I really don’t know how he made it to get one rank higher after a day?
August 27th, 2009
10:53 am
very interesting, thanks
August 27th, 2009
2:16 pm
Very nice tips! I appreciate
August 27th, 2009
5:58 pm
Similar to what we are doing with our e-commerce site. Very specific search terms work wonders ;]
August 27th, 2009
11:53 pm
I agree that narrowing your offerings online will get your site ranked higher, this can be even improved if you’re targeting a specific geographic area.
August 31st, 2009
10:58 am
The higher the competition, the lower the possibility to have a better ranking or vice versa. Moreover, you can still use different ways to improve your ranking.
September 3rd, 2009
12:17 pm
I’ve seen focusing in on a keyword term result in very quick results myself. We went from no where in for “bargain pool supplies” to the page 1 seventh one down (position 7) in about 1 week. So long as you “exist” somewhere for primary keywords in the top 100, then you can get listed well quite fast.
September 24th, 2009
6:14 am
Sword in the stone campaign? Can you tell us about this more? How can it help advertisers?
October 1st, 2009
5:43 am
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October 12th, 2009
5:36 am
Thank you for good technique.
October 14th, 2009
11:42 am
this is an excellent article.
i totally agree that shrinking your offerings is gonna make your site ranking higher.
Moreover,if you’re focusing on an area,it’s gonna be improved.
October 15th, 2009
12:18 am
Nice tip!
It’s very useful for me.
November 4th, 2009
11:48 am
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November 4th, 2009
12:26 pm
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