How keyword research helped All About Spelling to online success by Jerome Smail, 8 January 2010

Unique visits to Marie and Greg Rippel's website, all-about-spelling.com, increased from five people a day to 4,000 after the couple used Wordtracker to find the right keywords to target. Jerome Smail of The Website Marketing Company and SEO site explains how they did it.

Marie and Greg Rippel used keyword research courtesy of Wordtracker to turn their home-based online publishing enterprise into a success story, demonstrating that it’s possible to build a thriving internet-based business without a high level of technical knowledge or a large budget.

The couple’s effective search engine optimization of their website, all-about-spelling.com, raised the daily number of unique visitors to the site from about five to approximately 4,000 in little more than three years, reports Rick Romell of the Journal Sentinel.

Now the website - which sells educational books written by Marie and Greg - is bringing in sufficient levels of income to support the couple, pay subcontractors and help the two of them enjoy a lifestyle they used to dream about.

That dream was to move from the Chicago suburbs to North Wisconsin and publish tutorial books on spelling. It started to take shape when Marie took the plunge and built a website, paying just $200 a year in web hosting fees, although she admits she had to give such an outlay several days’ serious consideration before committing herself.

Building the site from a template, Marie published articles on spelling, reading and home tutoring. The objective at this stage was to build a following on the web and a potential customer base, rather than to make instant money.

Using Wordtracker for keyword research she found the best keywords to target with each article. She carefully optimized every piece she published, taking note of the keywords and niches for the relevant topics and making sure those she targeted appeared in the title, first sentence and last paragraph of each article.

Another part of the SEO strategy was to contact blogs on home-schooling to tell them about the articles on the site which they might find of interest. The aim was to get links from the blogs pointing to the Rippels’ site in order to boost its search engine profile, as one of the key criteria Google uses to rank a website is its inbound links. Marie believes the links she managed to attract resulted in Google viewing all-about-spelling.com as an authority on its subject area.

It wasn’t long before the Rippels had built a cabin in the North Woods and published their first book. The success of their SEO strategy built their business to a position where they were able to subcontract a professional to develop the website further.

The Rippels’ story serves as an excellent SEO case study for small businesses, as it clearly shows that building solid foundations with effective keyword research can give an enterprise a head start in a competitive market.