Internet Marketing Consulting

Archive for the ‘The SEO Experiment’ Category

I recently read on another Internet consultant’s website that we have to be able to practice what we preach to verify that we are capable of providing quality service to our clients. I fully agree with this statement which is why I have been running the Calgary search engine optimization experiment since  March 2009.

Since then I have been tracking the results of a number of keywords 0n 3 search engines in one of the toughest categories to crack in the search engine optimization industry. The category I am referring to of course is the SEO industry itself. It only follows that the experts in this industry, whether located in Calgary, or anywhere else in the world should be able to get a page 1 position on the search engines in the city in which they work.

Of course many companies are sending out massive numbers of emails to us, promoting their SEO services and promising to “get you on page 1 for your keywords or industry”. Let me clearly state once again – Anyone promising to put your site on page 1 without interviewing you, assessing your website and basically analyzing every aspect of your competition is someone to be avoided. My experience with clients who have paid $1000’s of dollars for these types of services suggests they usually get a high ranking with search words that do not benefit their business at all.The same is true for Pay Per Click advertisers. While they may show up on page 1 remember that simply means they are bidding higher than their competitors for the same keywords. It does not verify that they are actually effective at search engine optimization. More about that on another post.

One test you can run to evaluate a consultant of any type is to see if they are successful in achieving the goals for themselves that they promise to you.

While my search engine optimization experiment has not been 100% successful to date, I have been achieving significant progress and recently made a major breakthrough. In order to achieve success as an Internet marketing consultant in the highly competitive high tech city of Calgary, one category that needs results is search engine optimization. You can design a great looking website and have all the bells and whistles, but if nobody can find your site on the search engines, whatever you have invested in your website is not going to as valuable as it could be.

The breakthrough came in the keywords ” Calgary SEO ” and “Calgary search engine optimization“. While I have achieved major success with other keywords, these ones were the hardest to optimize for and i was obviously competing with the most experienced and effective SEO experts in Calgary. Something you need to appreciate is that page rank and position are impacted by the age of your website, so if someone created  a Calgary based search engine optimization website 4 or 5 years ago, they would now rank quite high.  My site is newer.

So here is a comparison of my results after 6 months:

While these numbers are not exceptional for the last 4 rows this is the first week that the site has appeared in the top 100. I hope to see continued progress in this area.

Stay tuned.

I switched my website (www.mmwebmarketing.com) over from being a  simple static HTML based site to a WordPress – CMS ( Client Managed System) because a friend of mine told me that Google liked blogs better than your regular website.  He mentioned that Google will index your site more often if it is built on a WordPress engine.

So I rebuilt my site using WordPress and, switched it on and then waited to see if Google was treating me any better on the search engines than before.

Lo and behold it is. My site’s search engine ranking is improving significantly.

Compare these numbers to those on my post from May 4th.

The positioning is significantly better that it was before. The bolded results are improved over the last time I checked.

It has been another 16 weeks since I began tracking the results of  my search optimization experiment. I mostly have been letting the project cook awhile and I have not been making a lot of  major changes to the home page. Basically the efforts made in the first few weeks have sustained their early success and my position for the original phrases I was optimizing for have held their positions on the first few pages of Google.

Here are the current statistics:

Keyword Phrase	Google	Yahoo	MSN
Calgary Internet Marketing	34	64	20
Internet marketing Calgary	29	70	12
Internet consulting Calgary	3	8	5
Calgary Internet consulting	7	28	4
Calgary Internet consultant	7	15	5
Internet consultant Calgary	6	8	5
SEO Calgary	n/a	n/a	n/a
Calgary SEO	n/a	n/a	n/a
Search Engine Optimization Calgary	n/a	n/a	41
Calgary Search Engine Optimization	n/a	n/a	24

Some of these phrases have improved while others have declined or remained in approximately the same position. The improved positions are highlighted in red.  Most importantly some of the highlighted phases are appearing in the top 10 pages for the first time. n/a means they are not in the first 10 pages and for all intents and purposes, invisible to most people searching  for them on the web.

While this is by no means perfection, it is important to see progress, especially in an area on the Internet where all the experts live. Search engine optimization experts should be able to position themselves highly in the searches for their services and they are the people who not only understand the system, but need to be able to use it effectively to get resutls for their clients, who don’t.

At Millenium Consulting, we teach you to understand how easy it is be found and you will find this especially true if you are in an industry that does not have the knowledge or experience to make it happen.