SEO Progress Report
Well, it’s the beginning of September and we’ve moved from nowhere (i.e. not on the first 10 pages for our chosen keywords), to page 2 in less than a month.
We’ve used SERPS position 100 to indicate that our site didn’t show up in the first 10 pages.
Position 1 is at the bottom, so the lower the better on the chart.
Note: we’re talking about “organic search,” the main results listing, not pay-per-click advertising.
How We Made Progress
This is all we did, really, to make this progress:
- For the last three or four months, we’ve been building content on our new website, not exposed to Google.
- We removed some irrelevant pages on a micro-site we’ve been hosting for a client.
- On 12 August, 2012, we submitted our website to Google.
That’s all. We did no page optimisation, no extra link-building. Nothing.
Why the Progress?
We’re testing our theories.
We believe Google wants to deliver the most relevant page in response to every search query. That’s the page the user thinks most relevant, not the one that a search engine optimisation team thinks.
There’s all sorts of SEO advice out there on the web, but we think we should listen to Google. They tell us to,
- Make sure our websites are clean and tidy;
- Follow the SEO Guidelines;
- Deliver useful information;
- Create good in-bound links with appropriate anchor text;
- Make sure our pages load quickly;
- Make a popular site…
And so it goes on. We’d normally address the first two points first, but thought it would be worth changing the sequence, to see what happens.
Well, quite a lot happened. We wouldn’t normally expect to leap up the scoreboard as fast as that. It confirms our theory that content counts for an awful lot, but there’s still some way to go.
In Our Next Report
Next we’re going to look at page load speed. Again, we wouldn’t usually address load speed now, but Google seems to be pushing it.