SEO Review: May 14, 2012

Joe’s SEO Campaign

Ten #1 rankings this week, with 25 in the top 10.  Overall there were some up and down movements, no more than three spots in either direction for the ones that did move.

Eric’s SEO Campaign

Remember how Eric’s campaign showed massive gains in the wake of Google’s latest algorithm update?  Things seem to have leveled back out a bit.  While the campaign is still doing well overall and our main keywords continue to make small gains, several secondary and tertiary results have dropped back down to where they were prior to the update.  A few have fallen further than they were, but most show signs of slowly climbing back up too.  The Google dance continues.

This week the campaign has 17 top 10’s and two #1’s, one down in both categories from last week.

Josh’s SEO Campaign

Josh’s campaign has also shown some drops from last week.  Really, Google, it would be nice for you to settle on something.  Still, I’ll continue to attribute the lack of fresh content on the site to a large part of the continued volatility in this campaign’s rankings.  The truth of the matter is that the owner has gone back to school and between professional work and class work he hasn’t got a lot of time to update the site like I keep telling him he should.  Nonetheless, a bit more content on the site would do wonders.

We remain steady with four top 10’s: two #2’s and two #4’s.

Nilesh’s SEO Campaign

Nilesh’s main domain had one term fall from #6 to #7, but otherwise stayed steady in Google this week.  Eight terms are in the top 10 with one #1.  The other two terms are both ranked at #11.  Within the eight top 10 rankings for the secondary domain, one keyword had a #3 drop to a #4 and another went from #7 to #6.  Between the two domains we’ve got 16 top 10’s and two #1’s, with two terms ranked at the top of page 2.

Bryce’s SEO Campaign

Bryce’s campaign’s success continues as there are now eight #1 rankings.  Another keyword just entered the top 10 (at #10) this past Thursday.

Chad’s SEO Campaign

I got an email from Chad this morning that prompted me to look into his rankings, traffic and overall site performance a little bit more deeply this week.  He was a little dismayed that one one term was in the top 10 and I think there was a feeling that it wasn’t the most desirable wording.  I’ll write here the gist of what I wrote back to him.

The first thing to note is that his is a very competitive niche.  The fact that this campaign has any terms in the top 10 after a month and a half, especially the one that’s there, is something I’m pretty proud of.  The search phrase he’s not fully happy about is one that includes the word cheap, but as I explained to him, if someone is searching for cheap  then they’re looking for something inexpensive, not something chintzy.  It’s a good phrase to rank high with.

The other thing is that we’re just performing basic SEO on this site, when an advanced form is probably going to be needed, given how competitive it is.  This is something he and I spoke about prior to starting the campaign.

I also took a look at his traffic and sales data.  There was a large spike in traffic in the middle of March, prior to starting our SEO campaign.  Despite this additional traffic, there has been roughly 10% more in sales in the last month and a half than the month and a half prior.  There have also been more completed orders.  That is, there are some orders that are started but never fully completed, and this has decreased.  Outside of the traffic spike in March, the number of visits has actually been pretty much in line with what it has been.

As I told Chad, I don’t think full credit for the increased sales and conversion can be fully credited to the SEO work done on the site, but I also don’t think it has nothing to do with it.

In the end, my opinion is that the site has shown steady progress, but that to get more of the search terms ranking, and ranking well, we’ll need to do one of several things I listed for him, one of which includes upping the campaign to another level of SEO.

Larry’s SEO Campaign

Larry’s site continues to do the Google dance, though as I mentioned last week I don’t really have a way of knowing if that’s partly because of the algorithm change or what.  As it is, Larry’s got three top 10 rankings, including one #1.  There’s also a #1 Google images result.  I wish I had a good way of tracking the rankings for his YouTube videos in the Google videos search results, because a manual search shows that a lot of his videos rank high for the search phrases he’s targeting.  I did the optimization of those videos myself, so I’ll gladly take credit for those rankings.

Outside of all that, Larry’s campaign has shown improvement in three search terms since I started tracking.  Some have gone down as well, one by as many as 23 spots, but these a) weren’t ranking high to beging with and b) have mostly been Google dancing anyway.  One of the phrases has shown an almost steady decrease, but I’m thinking that should turn around in time.

Danielle’s SEO Campaign

Danielle was referred to us by someone else on this list, which means that person must be happy with the job we’re doing.

Danielle has an existing website, but it was not professionally built and it was not optimized for search engines.  Danielle opted to stop paying for hosting with the old site at the same time she decided to do a redesign, so the site will likely fluctuate quite a bit for a while since we’ll be working on the site and the content over the next few weeks.

We’re tracking 36 search phrases for Danielle, but it’s mainly 13 locations with the same service listed in them and several niche services for two of the locations.

We started tracking the rankings last Thursday, so we’ve had a few days to see the natural state of the site’s rankings.  The top rated phrase as of today started off at #90 and has bounced back and forth between that and #48.  Four other phrases are ranked in the top 100 currently, and they’ve likewise bounced around a good bit.  Of course once real content has been added to the site and the pages have been properly optimized, I’ll expect to see a lot of progress.