Porn, without an iota of doubt, is the world’s most favorite niche. Accounting for over 30% of all data transferred on the internet today, no one can argue that pornography (or to put it mildly, adult content) isn’t loved. That would be the biggest lie our world currently affords.
So loved is adult content (or pornography) that we all either consume it directly or are on a first-name basis with someone who does.
However, as with all things that are loved and extremely popular, there is also stiff competition and an element of saturation that makes it EXTREMELY difficult to stand out, even with money budgeted for campaigns and promotion (on channels that accept this manner of content since regular outlets always turn it down).
However, before you begin to feel dim and completely weak in your bones, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Understanding the searcher (or consumer of porn) and how he/she begins this journey before landing on a porn site in the first place is very instrumental to your success as a ‘porn businessperson’ or marketer of adult content.
This is how it happens: someone gets lonely, then begins to search the internet, often, aimlessly, and then lands on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. There, this person is greeted with chiseled abs and pumped-up chests or perfectly toned boobs and humongous behinds.
Usually, this person (your ideal visitor or customer) salivates on these pictures and this is when their imaginations set in and your business clicks. Such an ideal customer or visitor then looks for a private place, yanks out their tablet, phone, or in rare cases, computer, and the search on Google, (in private mode, of course) or the plethora of privacy-focused browsers such as DuckDuckGo or Tor begins.
With these, a query is entered, and business, ultimately for you, begins!
Now, if you were reading closely enough at the beginning, you’ll notice something peculiar (but completely relatable for those of us in the SEO or organic conversion business). When your ideal prospect yanked out their devices to consume their preferred genre of porn they did not, through the process, bother with paid ads whether by means of banner ads or links.
Instead, your ideal client/customer relied on the search engines and the power of the SERPs to serve him/her the cravings that they desire at the moment. Unfortunately, for some strange reasons, many businesses in the porn mega niche never master this simple SEO truth and instead, believe that pumping more money into premium ads is the key.
The end result of such a strategy is simple and quite straight to the point: competition and struggle all through the life of the site. For many others, sadly, it ends with a quit and the ultimate death of the business.
Fortunately, this doesn’t need to be so and if you spare me just ten minutes of your time, I’ll show you how you can get things better for your porn business and importantly, ace porn SEO easily and rank your adult site up the SERPs.
Before I hit the gspot however, however, why on God’s perfect earth do you need organic traffic from search engines? Why does your site need to be on the first page of search engines and why do you need to dominate the SERPs for your chosen keywords more than any other thing in your porn business?
Photo Credit: John Rocha via Pexels.
Why Does Organic Traffic Matter More Than Any Other Thing To A Porn Business?
Porn is a hot topic that accounts for a healthy chunk of internet traffic today. Close to half of all sites on the internet are also porn related. Further porn sites receive more website traffic in the U.S. than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined! This makes it super great for good business.
However, porn is also a super sensitive topic: there are a lot of folks that feel offended by mere dressing, a man’s crotch, or a woman’s boobs. For all these folks, anything relating to sexuality is strictly frowned upon and they would even go to the rare extent of making certain that it is taken or pulled down if it rests in their power.
Then, there are the hypocrites that expressly ban (via IP settings and VPN configuration) all manner of adult content, including ads but clandestinely, go out of their way to use an anonymous browser (like Tor) to access the very content they are critical of, when no one is watching.
What is the implication of this? Simple. Despite the fact that porn is largely consumed with passion across all ages and occupations, people would rather live in denial of this than accept or embrace it, even the ones who are its biggest customers or market.
This sort of reality makes direct advertisements a challenge (which coupled with the fact that many conventional ads channels won’t even consider ads from adult businesses), a challenge that returns less ROI and is likely going to burn a big hole in your pocket as against helping you make more money.
However, there’s a way out: if the biggest consumers of porn are ashamed of it publicly but privately reach out via keywords to access the same content they deny in public (when in their closets), doesn’t it then make perfect sense to take the ‘advertisement’ to them organically via Search Engine Optimization, SEO?
This, essentially, is the basic thrust of SEO. It is also the number 1, 2, and 3 reasons why you should not only consider SEO for your porn business but rightly place it over and above every other means of attracting clients for your adult business and ensuring your accounts run in the green as against the red, month in month out; year in, year out.
Can You Handle Your Porn Business SEO Yourself?
If you’re to ask 100 SEO professionals, you’re likely to get all 100 saying the same thing: you should hire them directly, SEO is a complex subject that needs professionals to handle and not a game for amateurs, etc.
If you Google the same, the results are not going to be any better; after all, most of the folks writing about the subject are also professionals offering the service and it benefits them immensely to have you hire them directly. The million-dollar question however remains: does it benefit you to hire them, especially for top dollar as against attempting to do things yourself?
This depends on many factors. However, prime among these factors is what you aim for and importantly, how deep (or shallow) your pockets are.
Should you go ahead and hire SEO professionals to work on your site? That depends on you. Should you work on your porn website yourself? Will you even see results this way if you try?
Certainly, if that is your thing.
If the latter is what you’ve opted for, here, let me lead you by the hand and show you the way.
Photo Credit: Evelyn Chong via Pexels.
1. Get Your Onsite SEO Straight
SEO is basically divided into two broad parts: off-page and on-page. Off-page SEO deals exclusively with the details that need to happen away from the actual page or website you’re trying to rank. Such details as link building fall in this category.
On-page SEO, on the other hand, details what needs to be done right on the page or website that you’re intending to rank. This action often does not implicate much but the little details that it ensures remain the difference between massive organic traffic and an adult site that sees no action at all, SEO-wise.
So, what do you need to do to help yourself (or properly put, your website), onsite-wise?
i. URL Slug
The URL slug is the name of the domain where you’re publishing your adult content and the unique identifier of that post, photo, video, article, audio, or whatever it is that you’re publishing at the moment.
Now, the interesting thing is that this is usually auto-assigned immediately after you push the ‘publish’ button. Unfortunately, when what you’ve published comes live, the URL slug as it is added automatically hardly ever makes sense, SEO-wise; it is usually some generic rubbish that you’ll need to change if you’re to get awesome results in terms of organic traffic for that keyword(s), denoted by what you’re publishing.
What you need to do is to change the slug from the generic number, the gibberish, or the utterly incomprehensible extension into something simple and SEO friendly, reflecting what keywords you’re targeting, making sure to keep it short, snappy, neat, and without stop words.
If you’re using WordPress and run a time-sensitive porn website, your should navigate to “Settings” and then, “Permalinks”. There, you should select “Month and Name”, an option that allows you to clearly tell search engines (and human visitors) by way of the URL slug alone the month and year a post was published. For example https://hostingversus.com/2030/10/porn-seo-rank-adult-site/.
However, if your site isn’t time-sensitive like this very website, changing it simply to “Post Name” will suffice. In that case, the above example will simply read as: https://hostingversus.com/porn-seo-rank-adult-site/. This will tell search engines what that article is all about and regular humans (not bots) will also have a fair idea of what the whole article is about before deciding to either click through or not.
Irrespective of what platform is powering your website, this is better set at the launch of your adult website so that you won’t have to bother with it again at all and importantly, will have other posts and content simply follow suit. However, if you missed getting things right at the initial stage, the next best stage to implement this is now, with draft content, right before you hit the ‘publish’ button.
Generally, however, it is a bad idea to attempt to change the URL of a published work as it will negatively affect its performance with search engines and cause a bad user rep with the URLs already shared out.
ii. Heading Tags
When you’re interested in ranking your adult (or outrightly porn) content online, especially if that content is available as a website, you’ll sooner than later come across this piece of advice online: the only challenge is that, like most pieces of advice online, the meat is missed and only the ‘bones’ are dished out.
What you’re likely to see online is that you should make your content easy to read by writing shorter sentences, ensuring that you have short paragraphs, providing headings as appropriate, and importantly, allowing a lot of ‘white space’ on your website or pages in general.
This is only a part of the puzzle that you must understand; the other half, as if by grand conspiracy, is never shared. Here is it:
- Headings are useful to the reader as they make sense of your work and ultimately, make it easier to follow, especially if you’re writing some pieces of text. However, they are also very important to search engines too. Don’t just throw them around.
- Use H1s for the title of the video, article, story, gif, or whatever it is that you’re sharing with your audience on your adult or porn website.
- H2s should be reserved for major headings, unconditionally.
- Reserve H3s for sub-headings.
- As a general rule, you can ignore H4s to H6s in your work or adult content. They do not have as much value as the first three (3) mentioned.
Doing this gives search engines a sense of what your content is all about and with this newfound sense and direction, it is easier to reward you with ranking for the keywords that you target.
The above should be deployed with the option right below to get the full SEO benefits.
iii. Variation Of Your Keywords In Your Headings And Content
Search engines, especially, Google, are well smarter today than they were 10-20 years ago. The import of this is that the search bots and algorithms are written in such a manner that they understand variations of your keywords, synonyms, and importantly, user intent. This is to say, as much as AI permits today, Google (and the plethora of search engines today) understand what the user intent is even when such a user isn’t very sure themselves.
What this means is simple and straight to the point: instead of having your keywords repeated all through your work and appearing as a spammer in the process, the smartest thing to do is simply to vary the keywords and use their synonyms or close substitutes. Importantly, what is hyper-relevant here is to write in a natural manner and ensure that your content flows, with your greatest focus being on serving the uses/readers of your work and not some bots or algorithms.
Of course, writing for readers involves writing and covering the subject matter in such a manner that nothing is left untreated at the end of the article, video, or whatever piece of content it is that you’re dealing with in the adult niche. The grand essence is to have the user’s intent met and this should be done according to the task at hand.
Summary?
500 words or 5000 words; a minute video or one spanning an hour… just make sure that the reader is answered and what he/she came for on your site, got.
No fluff.
iv. Focus On Long Tail
The concept of long-tail has been around for some time now and has been touted by those who are in the SEO world as one of the open secrets to a successful search outing. This is glorious and in theory, appears perfect.
However, what you are often not told or what largely remains unpublished is that long tails as a whole, without any thorough consideration of things such as the keyword difficulty of such keywords is pointless and will, in the long run, lead to premium tears and waste of time.
To get things right from the beginning and with one attempt, the smartest thing to do is to deploy the services of a premium keyword research tool and run your keywords through the tool, only selecting the easiest of keywords in your niche and creating content around such keywords.
An awesome option for this is KW Finder, a keyword research tool that I use myself and can attest to both its ease of use and functionality. It would be a smart thing to aim for Keyword Volumes (KV) in excess of 1,000 and Keyword Difficulty of 30 or less when starting out.
Photo Credit: Alexander Krivitskiy via Pexels.
Research Your Keywords Carefully & Plan Your Content
Generally, what is common when persons who are not familiar with the concept of SEO attempt to do when faced with the task of ranking content online is that, they simply select random keywords (mostly longtails), validate same with a keyword research tool and then, if it ticks whatever criterion they have set, content is developed around such a keyword and it goes live on their websites or blogs.
This works, if you’re lucky.
However, great chances are that, in today’s hyper-competitive online publishing environment, this is likely to fail or at best, produce subpar or plain old mediocre results. This is something that can be avoided and you can avoid it by being intentional and strategic about publishing online content for your adult business.
How do you achieve that?
The solution is actually simple and straight to the point: create a content calendar and make certain that you have your categories all mapped out, segmenting them into more detailed bits by tags and keeping things related, related and those not related, where they belong – with their kind.
This is called siloing in the SEO world.
With this strategy, you know exactly what you should be writing or even researching and what you should be linking to, and importantly, at what point. Because these are closely related, you are likely to cover more ground on the subject matter and importantly, ensure a perfect (or near-perfect) bounce rate.
Win-Win both for you and your readers.
Search engines also wind up being happy and your ranking soars on the SERPs.
It is as easy as that.
Ignore AI. Completely
There was a time when AI was still in its ‘infant’ stage: writing that came from it, at that point, was super easy to point out and decode. It was mechanical and often, did not make sense, at least, when taken contextually or even holistically. Even one who had no clue about such things could easily see that a piece of writing was mechanical and wasn’t written by a human.
Those days are long gone!
Today, AI has become increasingly better and more accurate. Using crawlers drawn from the length and breadth of the internet, the various artificial intelligence writing tools today simply crawl the web on a subject matter and in a manner of mere seconds, bring out a ‘unique’ article, ready for publication.
Now, the problem is that, good as it has become, its output is neither completely unique nor does it have that complexity and dexterity that only a human can muster in a piece of writing. In summary, the article and blog posts AI ensures lack a ‘soul’ and are completely ‘soulless’, so to speak.
Because such pieces of writing simply duplicate what is already available online and present the same in another way (more or less, rewrites), the search engines, especially Google hates it with a passion. To the untrained eye, AI writing is just like any other piece of writing.
However, to the professional (and in this case, Google); it is quite easy to sight – even amongst volumes of content. Once spotted, it won’t take more than a few days before your content vanishes from the SERPs, or if it isn’t yet there, gets a guarantee never to make it there in the first place.
If you want content for your adult or porn business website/blog, you’ll have to write it yourself and bootstrap things. If that appears like too much work, there are services that are willing to do this for you for a fair price. Yours truly is also available for such gigs and as an erotic novel author, I am more than qualified to handle such a gig on your behalf.
Zone In On A Sub Niche
About a decade or so ago, Google and the plethora of search engines were still in the early phase of their lives and existence. This means they were also learning the ropes and basics of what made them search engines, capable of serving user intent (in the first place).
By and large, for the time, these search engines did their best. However, looking back, it was just like the content of a cup in a mighty ocean. The effects were hardly felt and easily gamed by those who knew about these weaknesses.
However, in as much as these search engines were in their early phases, their progress and development also meant that there were a lot of loops in their systems and there was a plethora of ways with which to rank your content, irrespective of whether it was adult content or plain old porn.
However, recently, search engines have been very serious about relevancy and content satisfying user intent before allowing it to populate the SERPs. This means that content, generally, won’t just to shown simply because it is long or contains the right links; instead, preferred options would be such content that serves the user intent brilliantly.
Taking porn for instance, it simply won’t do to slap the photos/or videos of naked homo sapiens slapping their genitals together and sucking themselves to death: that is what everyone is now sharing/publishing. Publishing in such a manner also leaves the search engines confused as to what your site is about and how to show relevant pieces of content to search queries that satisfy some preset criteria.
You lose out if you’re addressing the whole world at this point.
Beyond the relevancy and satisfaction of user intent, there’s also the issue of time spent on page and bounce rate – which is typically the assessment of whether a visitor ‘bounces’ away from the landing page (or the first page he comes across on your site) or actually clicks and checks out another page/pages.
Google and many other search engines take time spent on a page and the bounce rate of a site as very important metrics that tell them whether or not you are serving your audience right.
A site that has visitors spending more than fifteen (15) minutes on it and on average, every visitor navigating/clicking on at least two (2) other page links tells the search engines that your site must be fulfilling the user’s intent. In the customary style, it will be rewarded with better ranking which will translate to more traffic which will end as more money for you.
An example of a properly niched adult site is Blacked.com. This site focuses exclusively on interracial porn and nothing else. Now, if that is your fetish, why would you not spend hours on the site, watching video after video?
Do you get the drift?
Photo Credit: Alexander Krivitskiy via Pexels.
Ensure Speed
People are busy with their lives these days. Even when someone has created time to take a quick look at some porn, it is not usually because such a person is either less busy or has nothing better to do with their time. Almost all the time, it is because the person has so much on their plate that they need to literarily let out steam.
When such a person lands on your adult site, what they want to see is a website that will brilliantly load in under a second, ideally. Two (2) to four (4) seconds are tolerable, being that most likely, your site is going to be powered by heavy photos and videos.
More than four (4) seconds? You certainly have something you need to work on if getting clients and visitors organically matters to you.
Before I share what you can do to ensure speed on your adult website, there is something worth saying/noting before we progress.
Google specifically loves fast websites and a website’s speed has been a ranking factor for some time now. The implication of this is that assuming your site and a close competitor tick up all the boxes and the only difference remains the website speed, Google will, without question, rank the site with the faster load times higher up the SERPs, without any questions.
Many search engines are thought to rely on a website’s speed for ranking too.
However, since Google is the foremost of them all and has come all out to mention it, we’ll use it as an example that applies across the board, so far as the reality of search engines is concerned and importantly, user experience.
So, how do you make your adult website fast? Here are the options that you can start with and work your way down:
1. Lazy Load Your Images And Content Generally
The world of offering content on the web is designed in such a manner that, most of the time, all the pages you are attempting to access load up once you make an attempt on the page. While this makes the reading process more ‘fluid’, it also has a way of ensuring that for that time when the page makes efforts to load, you, or your visitors for that matter, need to wait.
No exceptions.
One very clever way of addressing this challenge and actually seeing to it that your porn or adult content pages load faster than average and claim their rightful positions on the Google (and other search engines) SERPs is to lazy load your content, especially photos, and videos.
With this reality, content that hasn’t yet become visible on your screen won’t load; only what is visible to the naked eye and appearing only on your screen at the time being uses data and resources to load.
This strategy is achievable by the use of special themes, dedicated plugins, proprietary codes, and sometimes, is offered by a hosting company as an option or add-on. It has two major functions: insurance of speed and minimalization of resource use (when not needed).
2. Use Light Themes
Today, most websites and blogs are not built from the ground up. Instead, they are options that are plug-and-play, relying largely on themes and frameworks to do their thing.
This is especially true if you’re using WordPress or any of the popular CMSs now available.
This makes publishing an adult website (or any other website for that matter) devilishly simple and easy. However, there’s a huge downside to the whole setting: with themes and frameworks come bulk and its twin – a website that is pathetically slow!
To avoid this reality and get your adult site up as fast as it needs to be, you must shun any theme or framework that is bulky or any option that wasn’t built with speed in mind.
There are many options that are specially built to be extra-ordinarily light and do not carry unnecessary codes that seek to slow you down and frustrate your visitors; you only need to search online for them. The great part is that most of them are also free of any cost.
A super light theme (and/or framework) that is built properly, will certainly shave off some unwanted time, right up to 4-5 seconds or more.
This will make all the difference to your visitors and importantly, search engines!
3. Ensure A Fast Hosting Environment/Choose Your Hosting Provider Carefully
In the battle for a fast-loading website, the theme/framework is only a part of the overall options that when properly configured, make for a speedy website; one that is loved both by search engines and visitors. However, there are other variables that can be tweaked/worked on.
One such very important variable is the hosting environment.
A great hosting company will deploy the latest software and hardware in the hosting of your sites so that, as long as you have done your homework in other areas/aspects well, your site will load in a blazing manner, pleasing both bots and humans.
The challenge, however, is getting to understand the right hosting company to choose from; especially since almost all of them claim to offer speed benefits in the race to trap and keep you as a recurrent, paying customer.
The options I recommend for your adult business website are Vice Temple Hosting and TMD Hosting – options that are up-to-date with technology and are very interested in getting you up the SERPs as far as you do your own bit.
While here, also take note that offshore hosting is preferred in this line of business. You don’t want DMCAs to affect your new business in any way, especially in your beginning days.
4. Use A CDN (If Possible)
Finally, on the business of speed, use a CDN, if possible.
A Content Delivery Network, CDN, makes certain that your adult content files are stored on geographically distributed servers and served from the one(s) closest to the client(s) at the time of request.
This smart thinking removes the latency (delay) that would otherwise be felt when users attempt to access your content from geographically diverse locations.
A CDN isn’t exactly cheap though; but in the long run, it pays for itself and is something I personally recommend. In this regard, Cloudflare is a great starting place.
If you’re just starting out however and your budget is tight, there’s a way around it: figure out where the bulk of your clients access your content from and kindly request your host to change your server location to one closer to the popular location of the majority of your clients, to reduce latency as much as possible.
Another way around it is to focus your content and purpose your adult business site to a particular location and on launch, focus on hosting only with companies that have servers on or close to such prime, pre-selected locations.
This may appear complex…but in reality, it is as simple as an email and a choice.
This way, when your target client base in that geographical location attempts to reach you, the server closest to them will serve them and not some server located halfway across the globe. With a server that is closer to your audience, they’ll experience relatively faster speeds due to reduced latency.
With Google and the plethora of other search engines today taking speed seriously and using same as a ranking metric, your guess is as good as mine, if and when you implement the above correctly.
Photo Credit: Alexander Krivitskiy via Pexels.
Don’t Bother About Links…Or, Build Only Quality Ones
About a decade ago, Google and the major search engines were all about links: have some spammy and/or extraordinarily poor content and flush it in with a lot of dofollows and your content was ranked up in the SERPs.
It was that easy and straightforward.
However, updates happened and down the years, the idea of building links is now as outdated as keyword stuffing. The value these search engines placed on links has also been demoted.
Today, the length of your content does not matter as much as its quality (though it is almost impossible to have awesome, very short content) and ultimately, links aren’t rated a tad close to how they were in times past.
So, if links aren’t that important to ranking today, what is?
Content that satisfies the user intent and answers why they landed on your adult website in the first place is what does it. To publish this type of content, you must think as your readers would and importantly, see your adult/porn website through the lens of their eyes.
You could start this by installing heatmaps to see the behavior of your site users/visitors and also, take a very good look at what they do when they land on your site. An awesome and free option is Clarity from Microsoft.
Beyond heat maps, looking at your bounce rates and figuring out why your visitors aren’t taking a look at any other page/content (besides the landing one) but simply bouncing off is a great way to wrap this off.
But, what if you need to build links and want all the benefits you can get, SEO-wise, and would want to leave no stone unturned?
A smart move I must say.
If you’re not ready to wait and attract links the natural way (this is possible and most adult sites benefit from this strategy), you must ensure that you build the most authoritative and high-quality links, related to your niche in as a natural way as possible.
This way, with a dose of luck, you just might pass the ‘tests’ and get what you’re looking for.
Photo Credit: Tofros.com via Pexels.
Go Mobile And Ensure Responsiveness
Between 2005 and 2012, there was a very strange reality that held sway: a website would look perfect on a desktop, almost glorious even. This same website, accessed from a mobile device, usually turned out a complete mess. So messy were such websites on mobile that even accessing them was a challenge in the first place.
The pain users faced eventually got to developers and plugins that could render a mobile version of a website when installed began being rolled out and immediately, were an instant hit.
However, some webmasters did not like this reality and instead, preferred to build a mobile version of their blogs or websites different from the ‘main’ option. This meant that users who attempted to access such websites from a mobile device were redirected to the newly introduced mobile version.
It was as easy as that – and everyone was happy, at least, at the time. With two options, the conclusion was that you couldn’t go wrong – or so everyone thought.
At this time too, curiously, Google began to take note and it did not take time before an update was rolled: the Mobile Friendliness update.
This update prioritized content that rendered perfectly on mobile devices and even took it a step forward by rewarding sites that offered their content first to mobile viewers, given the fact that the plethora of consumers today begin the research cycle on a mobile device.
The reaction in the theme and hosting world (generally) was instant. Immediately, theme developers started offering skins, frameworks, and themes that reflected this reality. At last, the concept of having a website render poorly on mobile devices was a thing of the past (or so we generally believed).
In the real world, however, there are some webmasters that appear not to have got the memo. For these webmasters, once a site renders correctly on their primary devices (which are often standard laptops and desktops), they simply allow it fly. Personally, I have come across some myself as late as some months back…they are truly a pain to access!
If you’re such a webmaster, then, you already know what to do if you desire your adult website to flourish and take the place it rightly deserves on the SERPs.
What If You Prefer Someone To Help You?
At over 5,000 words, this article, ‘Porn SEO: How To Easily Rank An Adult Site’ is as comprehensive as it gets. It is also super detailed and leaves no stone unturned in order to guide you to get the ball rolling (in order to attract that much-needed ‘love’ from search engines).
However, things can get overwhelming and this is understandable. When I first started out (about two decades ago), this piece I just wrote here would have confused the living hell out of me. If that is you, not to worry: things are not as bad as they seem.
If you’d rather have someone help you (especially with adult content – but not limited to it), I can be of help: all you need to do is to fill this form and I’ll be in touch.
Before you fill in the form, however, kindly note that due to the sensitivity of offering adult content services, I accept payment only via USDT. This way, both our identities are protected.
If this is okay with you, reaching me is only a step away as already indicated.
Photo Credit: Rodolfo Clix via Pexels.
Wrap Up
SEO is challenging and needs many functional elements to make sense. Adult SEO (or porn SEO, if you prefer) is even more tasking.
However, that doesn’t mean it cannot be done. Many have done it with great success and many more will keep doing it and getting it right, provided the basics are followed – to the letter. These basics are what this article is all about.
However, the sweet thing is this: you can also get someone, for a fair price, to handle your adult website SEO for you. This is where I come in.
Whatever route it is that you elect to take, know that success is VERY possible and only you can stop yourself – even as there is fierce competition in this niche online.