SEO Review: August 6, 2012

Joe’s SEO Campaign

The first thing I noticed when looking at this campaign this morning was that it looked like everything that moved at all moved up.  That didn’t turn out to be true, as one search phrase dropped three and two others dropped one, but they were hard to pick out from all the positive numbers.  We had search phrases move up anywhere from one to 32.

In all of that, we gained a new #1 ranking, moving the total number of top rankings achieved in this campaign to ten, which is one more than last week, though we’re down from 26 to 25 in top 10 rankings.  Still, the overall progress is very good.

Eric’s SEO Campaign

This one remained steady with two #1’s and 13 top 10’s, though there was movement and and down in a lot of the search terms.  The good thing is that most of the drops were on phrases that were not ranking great in the first place and are secondary anyway, while most of the positive movement was throughout first three pages of results.

Nilesh’s SEO Campaign

Nilesh switched his design back to an older version a few weeks ago, so I was interested to see what kind of effect that would have on his rankings.  The answer is: Mixed.

Nilesh has two domains that we’re tracking, the secondary one of which is merely a redirect to one of the pages on his site.  Since the switch, Google seems to have really favored the secondary domain, whereas it previously favored the primary one.

As of this week the primary domain lost its #1 ranking (down to #2).  In fact, every search term dropped except for one of them, which went up one spot to #4.  Remember that at points, all ten search phrases have been ranked in the top 10, even if only for a little while.  The ones that were not consistently inside the top 10 were just outside of it.  Some of those are now on page 3.

The secondary domain, as I mentioned, is finding much more favor with Google.  This one contains one #1 and nine in the top ten, which is up one from last week.  Three search phrases did drop one spot, but one went up one, another 25 and another 43.

Bryce’s SEO Campaign

We’ve got eight #1’s (down one from last week) and 16 in the top 10 (unmoved).  The one that dropped went down one spot to #2 and is kind of a long tail keyword anyway (meaning it’s not one of the more popularly-searched terms).  We’ve got one term that’s been doing a good bit of dancing over the past few weeks that ended up seven spots higher than last week at #18.  It peaked at #11 during the week, but outside of that and two days it spent at #16, this is the highest that particular  term has been, so we’re seeing a good upward trend.

Larry’s SEO Campaign

We’ve got our usual one #1 ranking, but lost one of our top 10 for a total of three in the top 10 this week.  On the plus side, both of the terms in the top 10 that are not already ranked #1 moved up.

Danielle’s SEO Campaign

Danielle’s rankings win the Most Improved of the Week Award.  One search term went down four spots and two didn’t move (they’re ranked #1 and #2).  Every single other term that is ranked in the top 100 (and a few that previously were not) moved up this week, and nearly half of them went up by double digits.  For weeks we’ve sat at one #1 and four top 10’s, but this week we’ve got one #1 and seven top 10’s.  I’m hoping this trend continues as Google realizes that the site is legitimately about these terms.

Ben’s SEO Campaign

For the first time we saw a majority drop in Ben’s rankings.  The vast majority of the drops were only by one or two spots and there was some positive movement too, but Google seems to be home from the honeymoon.  That’s not to say the campaign is hurting by any means.  We’re still looking at a dandy ten #1 rankings and 51 top 10’s.  Since the site is starting to level out, it’ll be time to start on additional work in the coming weeks.