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!