Just goes to show it takes a lot of work to get a website recognized by the masses.
Yeah, it can be a lot of work depending on whether your targeting local or national keywords. The forums main competitors for traffic are (in this order) AuctionZip, Storage Treasures, Storage Unit Auction List, American Auctioneers, CubeSmart, & Califorinia Storage Auction News. There are also a handful of news and article sites that move in and out of the top ten, but they usually don't last very long.
The truth is, this forum has the potential to outrank all of these sites. The problem is, these other sites have been working on their SEO for the last 2 years or longer, whereas the forum has had no SEO at all. As a matter of fact, up until I took over, the keywords that were listed on the forum were the same keywords that came with the template. SMF, Forum, Index, etc. Pretty embarrassing. Another thing, other than AuctionZip, the forum is the only other site in this group that has a DMOZ listing.
This is just an estimate but I would say that the forum will rank #3 for all relevant keywords in the next 6 months. It will be tough to outrank Auctionzip and Storage Treasures because AuctionZip has over a million backlinks and storage treasures has around 200K. The forum has a little over a thousand, most of which have originated in the last 30 days.
The good thing about the forum is, Google loves content. I believe that this website has more storage auction related content than any other website in the world. Although AuctionZip has a lot of overall "auction" content, it pales in comparison in "storage auction" content. Storage Treasures has a lot of low quality pages with only a few lines of text, that's because it lists the name address and phone number for every storage facility in the country. StorageUnitAuctionList isn't half bad. If you're interested in saving some money of a subscription to their service, you can use this
Storage Unit Auction List coupon code.
Anyway, only time will tell. I have short term goals set and the forum is already exceeding my expectations. Let's pick this thread back up in February to analyze the progress.
Alexa 283, Storage Auctions #12.