SEO Review: April 2, 2012

Joe’s SEO Campaign

Still steady with 26 search phrases ranked in the top 10 of Google, nine of them at #1.  I feel this site is primed for a jump in rankings whenever Joe is ready to jump to the next level of our SEO service, which features more variation in the kinds of authority building that we do.

Eric’s SEO Campaign

Eric’s still got two #1 phrases and 14 in the top 10, though there has been a little movement  up or down one or two spots for most of the phrases in the last week.  The two main phrases did drop a little, one from #14 to #17 and the other from #19 to #24.  They’ve both moved around a lot in the time I’ve been optimizing this site, and they’re both fairly competitive terms.  Like Joe’s campaign, I think this one is going to take another level of SEO service to make a big push for the main terms.

Eric called me last week to discuss why a few of his terms had dropped.  I took a look at his site and looked over the landing pages for the search phrases that had dropped and found that each one had the original default landing page text.  That is, Eric hadn’t updated those particular landing pages with phrase-specific content, whereas pages that were doing well had unique, search phrase-specific content.  I thought it was cool to see an actual example of why unique, original content is important for search engines.

Josh’s SEO Campaign

Two #1’s and three top 10’s in Google this week, which is down two top 10’s.  I maintain that this site is in need of fresh content on a steady basis.  Nothing points to this more than the fact that the homepage still has an advertisement for a New Year’s coupon that expired the first week of January.  It’s now the first week of April.

To this client’s credit, I do know that he’s extremely busy and is taking a full load of classes right now, but it would behoove him to keep the site updated.

Nilesh’s SEO Campaign

This week we’ve got 17 phrases in the top 10.  Whereas last week had a downward trend overall, this week only one term out of 20 was ranked lower than it was last week, and that one only dropped one spot.  Every other phrase either maintained or moved up, some by as much as eight spots.

Bryce’s SEO Campaign

The stats for the top 10 remain the same this week as last week: eight search phrases in the top 10, four at #1, two at #2 and one at #3 and #4 each.  One phrase dropped from #17 to #19, but the one we’re working pretty hard on peaked at #36 (a record high) and ended up at #38 this morning.  That’s after dancing a lot over the past few weeks, hitting as low as #63.  Definitely trending in the right direction though.

Chad’s SEO Campaign

We started tracking Chad this past Friday.  He’s in a particularly competitive ecommerce niche, so we’re looking forward to the challenge we’re presented with in optimizing this site.  I told Chad at the start that our Starter SEO Package probably wouldn’t get many of his terms to the #1 spot, but that it would get his primed.  The plan is to go at it with the Starter for a few months to see how it does then review it after a month or few to see how things are going.  I expect that after a few weeks to a couple months we’ll see some improvement.

We’re tracking 16 phrase for Chad because he gave me some very good, competitive keywords, but during the keyword research phase of setting up his campaign I discovered a few extras that could be really good for him.  Instead of swapping them out I decided to track them all, since they’re also closely related.

The plan is to give the site a few days to see how it ranks on its own (because, as you know from reading this blog, rankings can bounce around a bit).  One phrase started out at #81, but as of this morning none were in the top 100.  The good thing is that we haven’t actually touched the site yet, so it’s just a natural drop, if you will.

During this week we’ll be going through the site to optimize pages for the terms Chad’s trying to rank for.  Once that’s done we’ll see if there’s any change in the ranks.  After we’ve given the search engines time to evaluate the on-site changes we’ll see how the rankings are effected, and then we’ll start up the off-site SEO.

As I said before, this campaign presents a particular challenge, but I’m really looking forward to tackling it.