SEO Review: May 21, 2012

Joe’s SEO Campaign

Ten #1’s and  25 top 10’s, so we’re holding steady here.  There were a few that moved up or down a couple spots, but nothing major.

Eric’s SEO Campaign

Eric’s campaign continues to do some Google dancing, with some rankings dropping as much as 10 and others jumping 30.  The site hasn’t had any major content changes, so I can only guess that Google’s latest algorithm change is still trying to figure out where to put the site.  Most importantly though, the main search terms for which the site is being optimized have shown little fluctuation with the exception of one that dropped to #21, which is about where it’s been on average since it first started making gains through our efforts thus far.

We’ve got three #1 rankings this week, up one from last week, and we’re maintaining 17 in the top 10.

Josh’s SEO Campaign

We’ve seen some gain and some loss with Josh’s campaign this week.  We’ve still got four key phrases in the top 10: two at #2, one at #3 (up one from last week) and one at #4, which his Google Places entries down fairly well for his two main keywords.

Nilesh’s SEO Campaign

Nilesh’s rankings are pretty much right where they were last week, with the main domain having one phrase drop one spot while the secondary domain had a few drops (only one out of the top 10, to #14, but it’s not for a main phrase).  Overall there are 16 in the top 10 with each domain having a #1 ranking.

I did make a change to his website’s pages over the past week in an attempt to increase conversion.  One of the goals of the site is to get people to fill out a certain form in exchange for some information.  Instead of having a link to the page with the form on all the blog pages, I added the form itself directly to the sidebar of them.  We’ll see if that creates any uptick in conversions.

Bryce’s SEO Campaign

Honestly, this site’s SEO results bring me so much joy.  The website is in a very competitive niche and has continued to rank high throughout algorithm changes and website design changes.  While I’ll admit that the site ranked high for some phrases before we started any work, it has since moved up to #1 in almost case.

As well as it’s doing, I decided to start optimizing for some tougher, ore generic phrases.  Before last week, almost every search phrase included the city in which Bryce’s shop is located.  A few days ago I used Google’s keyword tool to suggest some other terms we might use.  After doing a bit of research I settled on a few and added them.

I’m now tracking Bryce’s site for 17 search phrases.  Of those, eight are ranked #1 with 13 being in the top 10.  I’ve decided to merely track the new phrases for a while before starting the actual optimization in order to see the actual effect the efforts have on the ranking.

Chad’s SEO Campaign

Chad’s page 1 ranking dropped a few spots to the first on page 2, which is a shame.  It’s been at #8 for a while though, so I expect it to bounce back up.  Outside of that we’re still looking at phrases coming into the top 100 one day then dropping out the next, which means there’s a lot of Google dancing going on.  I think the best thing for this campaign would be to add an on-site blog.  This was one of the recommendations I gave Chad last week when we were talking about how to keep improving his search engine ranking.

Larry’s SEO Campaign

Larry’s site had one search phrase drop out of the top 100, but as mentioned before, it wasn’t ranked high to begin with.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that every other search phrase that was already ranked improved.  This week we’re looking at one #1 and three in the top 10.

Danielle’s SEO Campaign

It’s amazing what a difference just having a website with basic search engine optimization principles can make.  Danielle’s new site is not yet ready to show to the world, but the pages have all been set up and it should be ready as soon as she can provide the rest of the content.

Last week, only four search phrases were ranked at all.  The top one came in at #70, the rest being in the 80’s and 90’s.  This week we’ve got 23 ranked terms ranging from #6 (the only one in the top 10) to #98.