SEO Review: February 6, 2012

As I mentioned last week, we’re adding two new campaigns to our report this week.  One is a real estate agent specializing in a certain niche of sales and the other is a popular local women’s clothing shop.

Joe’s SEO Campaign

Joe’s search engine rankings remain virtually unchanged this week.  One term went down a spot and a few went up a couple spots, but even looking at the timeline throughout the week, the chart remained virtually a straight line for almost every search phrase.

Oddly, the report remains wrong on at least two search phrases.  It lists them both out of the top 100 search results, yet doing a non-personalized search shows one at the #1 and #2 spots and another at the #3 and #4 spots.  It’s accurate on every other search phrase I’ve checked though, both in this campaign and others, so my thinking remains that the software has a bug in reporting when there are two results ranked right next to each other.

Eric’s SEO Campaign

I added several search phrases to the tracking portion of this campaign this week.  One of the words in the search phrases we’ve been tracking can be slightly changed and show different results, and both words and commonly searched.  While most of the rankings between the variations are similar, there are some differences.  Of note is the tweaking of the main term for this campaign, which is about halfway up the second page for the new term, but still fluctuates between the bottom of the second page and the top of the third from day to day.

I made sure to keep a special watch on this campaign this week as we gave the site a new design.  Along with that came a restructuring of several URLs.  I spent a good bit of time setting up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones, so I wasn’t expecting any drop in results.  So far so good.  Like Joe’s campaign, Eric’s remained pretty steady this week.  One or two phrases dropped a spot, but several jumped between one and three spots.

Josh’s SEO Campaign

Josh had some big drops this week with a few small gains.  Looking back at the week’s timeline I think a lot of this can be attributed to the Google Dance, but it would definitely behoove this website to get some fresh content on a weekly or at least monthly basis.

Nilesh’s SEO Campaign

Nilesh is one of our new additions to the weekly SEO review.  His site has had some passive SEO performed on it for some time, so he was already in a good spot for a few of his keywords.  In addition to starting this campaign, we did a massive redesign of his website, paying careful attention to many of the SEO factors already in place.  We are tracking the terms for which his site was already being optimized in addition to a few more.

For the most part the search phrases remained steady with no fluctuation whatsoever, which isn’t a bad thing because they were all on the first page already.  However, we were able to make a great upward push with six phrases, including his two main ones.  Some of these results have gone from page three to page one in the course of the week.

Bryce’s SEO Campaign

At the moment we’re ranking Bryce for industry terms, but the plan is to eventually start tracking and ranking brand-specific terms.  As of last week though, Bryce’s website ranked #1 for one phrase, #4 for another and #45 for a third while three others (more niche, surprisingly enough) are not in the top 100.  As of today, the #1 phrase is still #1, the #4 has moved to #2 and the #45 has moved to #35.

We’re slated to redesign Bryce’s site in the coming weeks, so more of an effort will be made on optimizing the unranked terms and making a big push on the phrase that currently ranks at #35.