The Ridiculously Amazing Case Study about What Basic SEO Can Do, Part Two

This post is by Cathie Dunklee-Donnell, Advanced SEO Analyst and owner of Ducktoes Computer Services Inc. Ms. Dunklee-Donnell is certified In Advanced SEO by Bruce Clay and Yoast SEO. Also trained at Pubcon Master Training several years in a row.

In The Ridiculously Amazing Case Study about What Basic SEO Can Do, Part 1, I showed how a site went up in ranking after I did the minimum amount of essential SEO work on it. I began the case study because I wanted to test for myself how effective a small amount SEO could be on a non-ranking site.

The minimum included both onsite and offsite SEO.  The site I chose was a four-year-old site, Salon-g.ca, a hair salon in Calgary.  I tracked the keyword with the most search queries, the best money keyword: hair salons Calgary.

What I did:

• For the onsite SEO, I created the title and meta description tags, and also added text, keywords, synonyms, and internal links.  

• For offsite SEO, I created eight links, high ranking ones, between 83 and 30 in Majestic Trust Flow. (Since the demise of Google page rank, at Ducktoes we use Majestic's trust flow as a ranking signal and SEO quality indicator.)

• The above SEO work resulted in the site going from not ranking at all to ranking on the fourth page, position 35, in only three weeks. Read more about that here.

Month 3

So now it's been three months since I've done any SEO on the Salon G site, and the site has continued to go up in ranking, but only slightly, and not enough to be where a site needs to be to get any traffic: on the first page.  

It is now on page three, position 28, for its money keyword "hair salons Calgary."  


In the last month, the site went from position 35 to 51 then back up to 28. I'll discuss this volatility later.

Adding Five Citations

So now I'll add five citations to the backlink portfolio for Salon-G and see where the ranking goes from here. Citations are typically done for local search rankings, but they also help organic rankings. 


The five citations are:

1. Foursquare
2. About.me
3. Canada411
4. CTI Directory
5. Wand

For our regular clients, we create many more citations than this, but for this case study I wanted to see what a minimum basic amount of SEO can do.

Tweaking the Title

I also tweaked the title to include the money keyword "hair salons Calgary."

Google Plus Page

I'm also trying to sort out Salon-G's Google plus/Google My Business pages. Salon G had several, for some reason. Every site needs to have a Google Plus/Google My Business Page.  (They work together and give you a map listing in local search results.)


However, while a Google Plus page is absolutely necessary for this or any site, duplicate Google plus pages are problematic. Working with a Google support tech, I deleted the extra Google plus pages and am verifying the remaining one.  We're waiting for the Google postcard to come in the mail with the verification pin.

For local search, if you didn't know, the optimal place is to be is the top three listings for your money keywords.

Wait and See

Now I'll wait and see what happens to Salon G's ranking for its money keyword "hair salons Calgary". Stay tuned.

Month 3, Week 1

I must admit, I'm surprised, if not flabbergasted. I didn't expect Salon-G's rise to the first page for their money keyword this soon. The rankings have been up and down quite radically in the last two weeks, but now in the last two days, Salon-G has been consistently on the first page for "hair salons Calgary"! They're on the bottom of the first page in 10th place, but on the first page nevertheless.

High Volatility for "Hair Salons Calgary"

The ranking for "hair salons Calgary" has been quite volatile, going from 31 to 28 to 49 to 16 to 51 to 10. The rankings for other major keywords are not changing rapidly like this.  See below graph from ProRank.

There must be something particular about this keyword that is causing it to go up and down with Google's algorithmic changes. The only way I've treated this keyword any differently is that I used it for the exact match anchor text for internal links to the home page. If the ranking goes dramatically down again, I'll change up the anchor text.

Wait and See (Again)

Now I'm waiting and seeing again. Stay tuned.

Links Still Most Powerful Ranking Factor

This post is by Cathie Dunklee-Donnell, Advanced SEO Analyst and owner of Ducktoes Computer Services Inc. Ms. Dunklee-Donnell is certified In Advanced SEO by Bruce Clay and Yoast SEO. Also trained at Pubcon Masters Training several years in a row.

To me, as owner of a small online marketing agency in Calgary, Alberta, doing successful SEO for several years, links have always seemed like an effective way to raise ranking. Yet,even though I believed links to be powerful, I wanted definite proof, and have been following research on links as a ranking factor from several sources.

Lately, I found this study from Stone Temple by its founder Eric Enge. (I also just attended a Masters' Training on SEO Traffic Optimization at Pubcon in Vegas and Eric was one of the speakers. He is an incredible trainer with tons of knowledge and expertise on internet marketing. If you get a chance, go to conference like Pubcon, when he is a speaker.  If you can't, at least read his blog.)

 Since then Eric sent me some slides about the research. Here they are:

   

Links As SEO Ranking Factor: Still Very Powerful! from Eric Enge

The study shows conclusively that links are still a powerful ranking factor.  It is important to note, however, that quality links don't compensate for poor quality content or website.  The research proves that if your site has good content, it will rank higher with good links. Without good content, the links will be much less effective.

If you would like more information on our link building or SEO services please call Ducktoes SEO at 403-219-3031 or go to our website's Calgary SEO page.

The Ridiculously Amazing Case Study about What Basic SEO Can Do

This post is by Cathie Dunklee-Donnell, Advanced SEO Analyst and owner of Ducktoes Computer Services Inc. Ms. Dunklee-Donnell is certified In Advanced SEO by Bruce Clay and Yoast SEO. Also trained at Pubcon Master Training several years in a row.

I'm doing a case study to show how basic SEO can help a website's ranking in search. Since it can be difficult to tell what particular elements of optimization are causing changes in ranking, I picked a domain that had no prior optimization and did not rank at all for any query except for its own name. Then I did some onsite optimization, internal links, and a few high ranking links. I used only white hat techniques, meaning techniques that follow Google Webmaster Tools guidelines. Now I'll see if and how the ranking changes and how quickly.

Site to be Optimized: The Salon G Website

Salon-g.ca is the site I'm optimizing. It was designed without a title and little text to create an artsy minimalistic style, a choice made by the web designer and the owner of the site. The owner also didn't want SEO at that time. As a result, the site never ranked for its keywords.

As part of the onsite optimization, I added a title and some text to the home page which is why you can see one below.  Before then, the site had no title and very little text.

The front page has a title and text now.

The site is one of many inner city hair salons Calgary: Salon-G.ca. The site and domain are four years old.

Day One

1. Keyword research: I did keyword research with Google Adword's Keyword Planner and found that "hair salons Calgary" is the best money keyword with 1300 searches a month and low competition.
 
2. Yoast and metas: After installing, Yoast SEO plugin, I added the money keyword to the title, meta-description, and body text. But the money keyword Hair Salons Calgary seemed awkward and user-unfriendly within the title, so I reversed the order of the words to Calgary Hair Salon. Awkward or not, I added "hair salon Calgary" to the body text anyway.
 
3. Added body text: Speaking of body text, the site had almost none on the home page, not even a title, so that is one reason the site isn't ranking after four years. I wrote a bit of text but not the 300 words that is recommended for ranking.  I also added some synonyms and closely related terms such as hair cutter, hair stylist, and the singular version of another money keyword "Calgary hair salon."
    
4. Added title: I also added a title using one of the site's keywords.  The lack of a title has serious SEO repercussions which can easily be avoided by adding one. Some SEO experts say the title is the single most important element in a site's SEO. Websites should always have a unique title for every page.  
 
5. Internal links: Since internal links are important for onsite SEO, I created some on all the other pages with the exact match anchor text: "hair salons Calgary" linking to the front page.
 
6. End of day: I checked the rankings of these keywords: Hair salons Calgary, Hair salon Calgary, Calgary hair salons, Calgary hair salon, Calgary hair stylist. The site is not ranking at all within the top 100 results for any of these keywords.
 

Day Two

At the beginning of Day Two, Salon-g.ca is not yet ranking for any keyword, including its best money keyword, "hair salons Calgary."

1. Google Search Console: I added the site to Google Search Console and configured it as per below. A more detailed process is outlined in this post about how to set up Google Search Console.  Here is an infographic of the same information.


• Created a gmail.
• Added properties to Google Search Console.
• Verified through Yoast SEO plugin.
• Set preferred domain.
• Picked international preference.
• Added sitemap.
• Created .htacess
• Created robots.txt file.


2. NAP and site description. I wrote out the NAP, keywords, and site description for use in citations and link building.


3. Built links. I gave the site some high ranking links with these Majestic trust flows:
   
   Link one: 68
   Link two: 46
   Link three: 83
   Link four: 71
   Link five: 42
   Link six: 47
   Link seven: 84

As far as previous backlinks Salon-g.ca already possesses, Majestic found 3 and gives the site a trust flow of zero. Ahrefs found 30 links and gives the site a domain ranking of 13 and a url ranking of  4. Google Search Console, so newly set up, didn't find any backlinks.

Amazingly, at the end of day two, the site is already ranking for one keyword. It is the 84th listing for "Calgary hair stylist." But still not ranking for the best money keyword, hair salons Calgary.

Position on Google search:
Calgary hair stylist: 84

Day Three

I stopped doing SEO on this day, but the site is now ranking for several keywords, including the best money "hair salons Calgary." It's in rank 63, on the 7th page of Google, in only three days!

Position on Google Search:
Calgary hair stylist: 76
Calgary hair salon: 83
Calgary hair salons: 70
hair salons Calgary: 63
hair salon Calgary: 90

Week One

At the end of the first week, the rankings continue to go up.

Position on Google Search:

Calgary hair stylist: 62
Calgary hair salon: 77
Calgary hair salons: 60
hair salons Calgary: 49
hair salon Calgary: 90

If you look at the money keyword "hair salons Calgary", you'll see it went from not ranking at all when I began optimizing, to ranking on the fifth page within the first week. This shows that while basic SEO does not place a previously non-ranking site on the first page within a week, it can propel a site up 51 positions within the first 100 results in the same amount of time.

Week Two

At the end of Week Two, Salon-g.ca is ranking on the fourth page of Google results, better than I would have estimated at the beginning of this case study.  With only basic SEO done onsite and a few high-ranking links, it went from Nth (not ranking) to 34 in two weeks.

And this is significant because the site didn't rank at all for four years before I optimized it a bit. The only change to the site was the optimization I did and the seven backlinks I gave it.

Position on Google Search:

Calgary hair stylist: 54
Calgary hair salon: 69
Calgary hair salons: 45
hair salons Calgary: 34
hair salon Calgary: 66


A month after creating links for Salon-g.ca, it's interesting to note that Majestic has only found two of the eight links I made and ahrefs only three. Google Search Console has only found three as well.

If only a small bit of SEO is so effective, think of what a full SEO campaign could do for this or any site. Of course not every site or campaign will go up as fast as this one has. Nor is this site on the first page of search results which is the only spot on Google which is effective for increased business and revenue.

Yet the power of SEO is clearly demonstrated by this case study.  SEO should not be underestimated or dismissed as a potential way to increase traffic and revenue to a business. If you'd like more information about SEO for your website please see our SEO (Calgary) site.

Why Being Mobile Friendly is so Important

Great Video on Being Mobile Friendly
I found this great and funny video on mobile responsiveness by Eric Enge and Mark Traphagan of Stone Temple.

 

As Eric and Mark point out in such a fun and informative way, being mobile friendly is an important part of SEO and will effect your ranking, especially on mobile devices. Google wants mobile friendly sites.  And what Google wants, Google gets, or should get, if you want to rank higher, that is. That's important, even essential for SEO, but is not the quintessential, absolutely tiptop, epic, most important, mother of all reasons to be mobile friendly.

The Quintessential, Tiptop, Epic, Most Important, Mother of all Reasons
So what is this mother of all reasons? To be kind to visitors, of course. Didn't your mother teach you that? When you make your site mobile friendly, you are also making it visitor friendly. Visitors come to your site because they need your services or are interested in your content. Many will come on their smart phones or tablets.  They want to do business with you.

Not a Good Welcome Mat
If you make it difficult for these potential business clients to see or use your site, they will become extremely frustrated.  And they are only trying to find your address, for instance, or to read some compelling content (you do have compelling content, don't you?) and are struggling to touch the links or scrolling sideways to read.  Your site's mobile unfriendliness is putting huge obstacles in their way. Not a good welcome mat.. And also a good way to get a higher than average bounce rate.

Your Raison d'Être
Never forget that visitors are who you made your site for, and you should make things easy for them. Visitors are clients and are the whole and sole purpose of making a website in the first place. They are your raison d'être.

Being kind to visitors, and making them happy with a great site and content, is also what Google wants, and is excellent for SEO and ranking, by the way. 

How to do it?
Here`s a short guide on how to make your site mobile responsive by Joshua Van Oosten, web developer at Ducktoes Computer Services.  Also here is another post about how Ducktoes's site is mobile friendly now.

Need More Help?
Ducktoes Web Design of Calgary can make your site mobile friendly if you don't have the time to do it yourself.  We do it all the time.

SEO for Beginners Subreddit!

Hey, we've started an SEO for Beginners subreddit on reddit.com.  Check it out! You can ask for help on SEO for your site or help others.

Ghost Referral Spam is Gone?

I first heard the news on the podcast SEO 101 with hosts Ross Dunn and John Carcutt: Google analytics spam was gone. Wonderful news! Yay, yay, yay, yay. (That's me dancing around the room and high fiving myself.) No longer would we have to filter the spam out of Google Analytics results to get truer data. Google had gotten rid of it. 

But could this really be true? When I googled this news, I couldn't find anything about it anywhere. Nothing. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.

I searched again. Then I found Conor Treacy's mention on Local Search forum. He offered this link to an article on SEM.  Conor has also written his own article on the disappearance.  Right on, Conor, SEM, and SEO 101 Ross and John!  Weird, such a big thing and only a few people talking about it and certainly not Google.

If it is gone, then why is no one talking about it?  Maybe no one is paying attention. Because if you did pay attention, you would have seen a drop in traffic in your Google Analytics data and reports starting in February or March. It's not traffic you'd ever miss, because with its loss you should have a lower bounce rate and a longer average session duration, a good, indeed excellent, thing.

Here is the content within the referral tab results of a site before Google started getting rid of the ghost referral spam.

You can see that the referrals shown are all ghost referral spam and that it is giving the site a very high bounce rate and low average session duration.

Now see the results after Google had started getting rid of the ghost spam.

As you can see, the bounce rate has only improved slightly and the average time on site has gotten worse, because there are still ghost referrals. I gave them a grey ghostly pallor in the above image as they deserve. So maybe this is why few people are mentioning the disappearance of ghost spam, Google hasn't been able to get rid of it all.

You can also see some real referrals from Yahoo, Cylex, Facebook, and Newswire beneath the ghost ones and how that traffic has a much better bounce rate and session duration.  That is why no spam in referrals would be so ideal and why I look forward to this happening in the future.  I hope Google will filter the heck out of the spam.  Otherwise our traffic in GA is not accurate. That is, unless we filter it ourselves, a difficult job.

Ghost referral spammers don't really go to your website at all, it's not real traffic, that's why the word ghost.  Somehow these companies are spamming Google Analytics with false traffic so people like us will notice the urls in our analytics data and go to their, the spammers', websites. They get traffic from their fake traffic, so they can sell us something or give us malware or something else not so fun or funny.  So don't go there.  We don't want to encourage them.

If you need help with your SEO or Google Analytics give us a call 403-219-3031.  Or go to our SEO webpage.

Be the Site Google Wants to See

To do a good job of online marketing for yourself and others you have to have some sense of what Google wants.

So what does Google want?

The answer is, of course:

Money. Google is a business like any other.  They want and need to make a profit. Millions of people use Google's search engine because it provides excellent results for almost any query. Along with those excellent results, Google serves ads, generating a huge profit.  In 2015 Google generated almost 67.39 billion dollars in ad revenue.

If Google no longer provided good search results, they'd lose the visitors to their search engine and all the revenue generated from those searchers when they click on the ads. That would be a staggering loss for them.

Which leads to the next question:

 What does Google not want?

Spam. They don't want manipulation of their search results so poor results are returned instead of excellent ones. In other words, Google doesn't want people to trick them with black hat or grey hat SEO  into serving poor sites when others would be better. Ultimately this would wreck their search engine and their business. They're not about to let that happen. That is why they've developed their search algorithm and Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, Pigeon, and all the other updates that are safeguarding the quality of their search engine. They will cut you off at the knees if they see you trying to trick them by manipulating their results. You'll be penalized in no time flat with a manual or algorithmic penalty.

What do you need to do then to make your site optimized for Google search? Make your site a search result Google wants to see and, more importantly, would love to return in response to queries.

How do you do that?  With excellent content that users are actually looking for and by making your site attractive and user friendly.  Also by letting Google know about your site's search worthiness by signaling authority and relevance.  There are hundreds of things you can do.  It's a lot of work but it is worth it.

If you want to learn how to do this SEO work yourself read this blog and many others.  If you don't have time, hire an ethical and quality SEO company that will do this for you.