Dear Diary. Today I'm top of Google.
I can retire a happy man. After 4 years of effort, my humble one-man band site is top in Google for the most important search term in my competitive market that is full of search savvy marketers. Googling "digital marketing training" in the UK or globally yields Non-Line Marketing as top banana.
Of course that statement comes with a raft of qualifications. First up, I may not be there tomorrow (as I wasn't there yesterday), and I am not even there all the time today. Maybe Google is giving everybody 15 minutes of search fame to keep us happy in these recessionary times, but in truth it is seeing whether people validate their search algorithm by clicking on my link. Second, it has taken 4 years to navigate to the top of the page by following all the usual tips about key word density and consistency and linking and so on. Thirdly, I built the site 4 years ago with a clunky design package and it's looking a dated site that doesn't render well in today's larger screen resolutions automatically, so my quality score will suffer as people click back to the search page. And also, the "Description" meta tag I crafted is not being pulled from my clunky design and so I am not compelling enough to encourage more clicks.
Anyhow, for the moment I am up there with the Big Boys, looking down on the IDM, E-Consultancy, CIM and even the mighty Dave Chaffey! But I won't be there for long.
So in the meantime I have a new site ready to roll - I've been building it over the past few months and its got all the Web 2.0 bells and whistles every digital consulting Johnny needs..shiny buttons, drop shadows, acres of lovely white space. Trouble is, once I switch to the new site I'm probably going to wave goodbye to my new found "Topagoogle" status.
Yes, the tech brigade say that it is easy to use the right re-directs to carry all the old stuff to the new, (here is Dave Chaffey's thoughts on the 301/303 debate), but I've just seen what has happened to E-consultancy...they launched their lovely new site a few weeks ago and have dropped out of the search rankings for key training phrases. Two months ago e-consultancy was top for all digital training searches but the new site has let pip-squeaks like me into the rankings.
So, in the immortal words of The Clash, "Should I stay or Should I go". Stay, with a naff site, or go, and lose my "Top Banana" status?
You'll know I went when I drop off the edge of the search cliff!
David Hughes
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Dear David,
It is a deep and real pleasure, and honour, to be able to reach out and share this very special day with you. Stay away from the edge of that cliff; stay!
Best,
William
Congrats David! And on the new site design.
Long may you reign supreme for this keyphrase, but I would have to point out that a Google smackdown with a traffic estimator shows that "internet marketing training" or "e-marketing training" are the most popular phrases with customers - so you'd best get busy on those.
Well spotted Dave! In truth I asked some of my "target market" what phrase they used and also had a look at the lovely Google keyword tools and decided (wrongly?) that the more savvy clients would be using "digital". Of course I should be like you and optimise for s spread of the phrases; and as predicted you're now coming above me for global searches for "digital" as well, but I'm top for UK...I've noticed that you always rank well for global and not quite so well for UK specific, and maybe you can tell me why? More to the point, where have e-consultancy gone post-new site launch...noticed they were forced into PPC action for that term now! Best regards. David
That's right David, I guess the more savvy will look for "digital" so good to see you have a sound keyphrase targeting strategy.
I host my .com site in the US which accounts for my not performing so well in the UK, but I do get lots of visits from around the world.
I have my UK domains Marketing Insights and Marketing Online for UK traffic but not a great strategy unless you put the resource in since I haven't updated the design of the latter since 1998 - embarassing!
If you are discussing this in future training a couple of good resources to point students at are:
* Multilingual Search, especially the SEO Forum
* Google Webmasters Tools on Geotargeting - this shows how you can geotarget without setting up a separate domain for each country. This approach has been used by Salesforce.com.
Hi David
Well done! And, yes, we have taken an SEO hit from our new site. I'm planning to do a post on this today on our site. And you can then link to it to fix our pain ;)
Our trouble would appear to come from changing domain (so nothing to do with design or site structure really if you get 301 redirects correct).
So new site is fine if domain is the same and URLs are the same or 301 redirected to their new equivalents.
Ashley
Hi David
Congratulations on reaching number 1. As you rightly point out we have lost many of our search terms when moving the site domain from(E-consultancy.com to Econsultancy.com) as part of our redesign. As far as we are aware we did everything by the book in terms of talking to Google, creating the right types of redirects etc yet still we have been severly penalised for creating a better site for our users. I guess this demonstrates why this is such a consistantly discussed issue for site owners.
I'm glad to say that we are slowly getting some of our ranking back but its a slow process and in the meantime we continue to lose potential traffic (and we would argue users are not getting the best options from their search results either). Our digital marketing training section seems to be a particular problem however but we're working on it.
Anyway good luck in keeping that number 1 slot!
Thanks for the posts Ashley, Craig.
Also re-assuring to hear that the pain comes from tha domain change and little else, and can be overcome. I have been working with a BtoB publisher who is about to push the button on their new site and are really worried that all their link equity will disappear with one mouse-click, so there are many people out there worrying about this. And as Craig says, it takes a long time to get back to where you were, so in the meantime a tactical PPC strategy still gets you visibility on the first page...at a cost.
And as a footnote, Dave Chaffey's site (hosted in the USA) is now coming top for global search and Non-Line Marketing (hsoted in Europe) comes top for UK search...we have to consider where we host our site having an impact on placement! Ho hum.