Increase SERP Rank on eHow

Last Updated 10/11/14

It’s time again for another eHow case study on increasing an article's SERP rank and an articles earnings.

A friend on mine came to me with an article that was recently posted on eHow: How To Host a Honeymoon Shower (article removed) and asked for some critical suggestions. Having looked over the article and given permission to make a public case study I thought I would share with you as an illustration on what to do to maximize your eHow earnings.

First of all the article should be written well; and it is. There are no grammatical errors or misspellings. Everything reads fine. Check. Now lets look at potential monetization.

What Makes A Profitable eHow Article?

I looked the article’s main keyword phrase “honeymoon shower” on Adwords Keyword Tool and see that it gets ~2,400 searches per month with a CPC rate of $0.71 per click. Click graphic for full size:

At a reasonable click through rate (CTR) of 1.5% this keyword should cost the combined advertisers approximately $10.65 per 1,000 page views on this page… of course not all of that gets paid to the author. Some of the revenue is skimmed off the top by Google and then more is skimmed off the top by eHow. Lets guess you could get around a quarter (I don’t know the actual cut ratios so this is a guess based on a 50% skim for Google and then a 50% skim from eHow) of that total.

That would mean if all 2,400 searches per month hit your page you could possibly get up to $6.39 for this article per month every month. That’s not going to happen but you could potentially get most of the 2,400 monthly searches. The trick is getting into the top spot on the search engines for your main keyword. If your not there then you’re only going to get a small fraction of those 2,400 searches and a small fraction of that potential $6.39.

Looking at your current SERP results for the keywords “honeymoon shower” I’m actually fairly surprised to see this article doing so well being that it is such a new article having only been published September 18th. It currently ranks:
• 1st in Google for “How To Host A Honeymoon Shower”

• 1st for “Host A Honeymoon Shower”

• 7th for “A honeymoon shower”

• 9th for “honeymoon shower”

Not bad at all but being 9th for the full keyword will still only get you a small fraction of the 2,400 searches for “honeymoon shower” (BTW: I’m purposefully omitting long-tail keywords from this analysis) so let see how we can get this page higher.

eHow's On-Page SEO

The on-page SEO is pretty good. The keyword “honeymoon shower” is in the Title and the URL, in the content 8 times plus 1 more time in the picture’s caption which is good though could be better. There is only a keyword density saturation of 1.6 percent which is on the low side.

Also it could be better if the picture’s file name had the keyword in it which it currently doesn’t. To do this the you would have to change the file name for the picture on your computer to something along the lines of “honeymoon-shower-invitations” (all words get a hyphen between them) and then re-upload the picture to the article. If you go ahead and change the caption to read “honeymoon shower invitations” instead you will start chasing long-tail and related searches as well such as “shower invitations”. You can sprinkle a couple references to “shower invitations” in the article to support this.

I would also take the opportunity to upload a new picture to the intro section with the file name “host-a-honeymoon-shower” with the caption “Host A Honeymoon Shower”. This would give you two pictures optimized for search plus you gain an extra keyword rich caption.

Lastly I would try to sprinkle in a few adjectives into the content which describe things as “shower XXXXs” like “shower invitations” mentioned above. For instance, the Keyword Tool shows that people search for the term “shower gifts”, “shower ideas”, “shower invitations”, “shower games”, etc. As the article currently stands it doesn’t described anything as a shower anything. This might not make a huge difference to alternate searches but should help out marginally.

Backlinks Increase SERP Rank

The ultimate goal with this eHow article is to get the search term “honeymoon shower” to the top of Google page 1. It is currently 9th. I would imagine a few of these tweaks could get it up a couple more spots but to get to number one will take a few backlinks like the one provided in this analysis here on Earn Residual Income Online; so that should help.

If I were the author of this article I would also try to get at least another keyword anchored backlink to it from my blog (post page only) or from someone else’s blog (also in a post page). If you’re really into it you could promote it further but that’s another topic altogether.

This article already has got one backlink now, so with a little more optimization let’s see how high this article can get in a few weeks.