30 minutes SEO To Get On Page 1 – original post here
Hey, welcome back rankers! Back in HD, ugliness in full resolution. I gave up sugar a couple of weeks ago, now I’ve come out with pimples. How does that work? Seriously. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you a little bit this week about blogging and doing the little things that count.
So you may remember a couple of weeks ago, about three weeks ago I think it was, I was talking to you about a former client that basically spent $12,000 on SEO and pretty much I couldn’t see SEO on the site. I don’t know what they did. Certainly, they didn’t do anything that we would normally do, and certainly the client’s rankings didn’t go up at all and she was quite upset. That’s when I brought out that other End of Financial Year product that was a four-hour only product, and we sold out of those pretty quickly. But I said at the time I reckon we could do more in four hours than what they did in 12 months. Well, it turns out we’ve done more in less than an hour than they did in 12 months. I’m not just saying this, “Look at us selling so good,” because obviously we are, but I’m telling you this because this is stuff that you could do. I probably could’ve taught our client to do this.
But this is what has happened. So we’ve worked on the site for less than an hour and I’ll show you what we’ve done in a second. You can see here that it’s come up in the course of the month so July, it’s gone up 36 spots, 38 spots, and 1 spot overnight. It’s at eight now so it’s on the front page, and this is a real estate related keyword. So it’s not an easy thing to rank for, but it’s gone from page four to page one. It really only started moving when Google had re-crawled everything, and then it just went bang. It doesn’t always happen like that. I love it when it happens like that but it doesn’t always happen like that. This is a small site. It’s a real estate niche, and so to get through and fix everything didn’t take a long time. We haven’t even maxed out the time yet.
I wanted to show you our reporting tool that we use. We use a thing called Harvest, which is a cloud-based time management tool. So whenever anyone’s working on the site, if I’m working on the site, we’ll just press start and time so we know how much time we’ve put into the client’s project. For this one, all we’ve done is add the keywords to the title, pretty standard, of just the homepage. Not the title page, just the homepage. We’ll also change it to https. That took about .03 of an hour. I don’t know what that is. I’ll let you work it out. But you can see .48 of an hour is what we’ve worked on the site. So less than half an hour we’ve worked on the site so far, and that has made it just go bang.
The other major thing that we did, and I don’t think the https took that long, putting the keywords in the title, .08 of an hour. What’s taken the main amount of time and what always takes the main amount of time is cleaning up the Google index. I can’t tell you how important this is. Well, I can actually. It’s really important. However, the reason it’s really important is that it has these sorts of effects. When you clean all that up, Google re-crawls everything and goes, “Ah, there you go.”
I’ll give you for instance, I’m creating a product at the moment for bloggers, and it’s basically an instruction manual for their WordPress site on how to make sure that they rank and the things that they should do on a daily basis, keyword research, all that sort of stuff. So it’s not a techie product, it’s more geared toward people who don’t want to know about SEO. They just want to press the buttons and make it happen. That’s a difficult thing to write but it’s good. It’s working. What I’ve found is when I’m talking to bloggers, and one of them happens to be an old mate, really old, older than me, and his name is Trevor Young. Hi Trev! Unfortunately, for Trevor, he’s a Cats supporter. But anyway, I’m a North Melbourne supporter. This is the search that we always do. Site, colon and then . . . I have to put the bin out, someone else can do that. I’m not doing that. I’ve done site, colon, and his web address, and as you can see here, it has 190 results.
Now typically for someone, well for most sites, it’s rare in fact. It would be the exception with it. That number there is what we want it to be. What typically is happening is Google is crawling things you don’t want it to crawl, and so it’s confused about the authority of certain pages within the site and what they mean. Usually there’s duplication, all those sorts of things. So that’s all we did on that other site. We went through and we tidied it up, all that stuff. So we’ve spent less than half an hour so far on that site, and it’s resulted in a jump of 40 . . . what was it? Forty, 36 spots or something up onto the front-page anyway. Now we begin the climb up the page.
Just looking at this one here, these results here, if I have a quick look at this, what I’m looking for is things that just . . . I’m scrolling fast because I’m just looking for things that are just standing out as being wrong, that shouldn’t be here. Trevor is a podcaster and author, a social media content marketer extraordinaire. Here’s one here. I don’t know what that is but I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be there. So we go through and get rid of stuff like this. The other thing that you’ll typically see is you might have pages of the Ws and not of the Ws.
But before you go and do anything, you’ve got to go set up that measuring, and that’s one of the things that I’m talking about in the blogger’s product. Because if you don’t set up that measuring, that ranking tool, whatever it might be, it doesn’t even need to be a manual one that you do every day, you don’t know the effect of the work that you do. What we’ll do now on this particular site is we’ll wait. I want to see this overnight movement go to 0 or -1, because once it’s done that and if everything else follow suit there, I know that the changes that we’ve made, Google’s got the most juice out of them and now it’s time to make the next changes. But you don’t want to go and make those next set of changes until you know Google’s finished getting all the love out of the changes that you’ve already made because you don’t know what you’re building on then.
We’ve got a couple of clients like that at the moment, and a lot of the work we do is monitoring this sort of stuff, is going in every morning, checking in. My morning consists of, before I get out of bed, check rankings of sites on the iPad. I know, it’s sad. Then looking at football and creating my content for the day, then I get out of bed. But that is just fantastic. It doesn’t usually happen that quickly. That’s happened in a course of . . . if I have a look at the graph here. Let’s have a look at the date. Therefore, the date that these changes were made . . . Well, it was on a Friday and the joy happened on a Monday. Over the weekend, actually. It happened on a Sunday. So it took Google a little bit of time to re-crawl the whole site and then it just went bang. That’s what typically will happen.
Now, how far you jump up after cleaning up all that stuff is totally dependent on obviously your site and the competition that you’re up against. The size of the site, the bigger the site, the longer that’s going to take. So your e-commerce sites are always going to take longer. But that sort of basic SEO’s as basic as it gets and it’s pretty easy to do. It’s usually configuration stuff.
The blogger product that I’m bringing out is geared at these sorts of people that don’t want to know about SEO, they just want to know how to do it. They just want to know the instruction manual, “Press this button, push that key.” It’s a challenge to actually create something like that but I think we’ve got it.
So I just wanted to show you that I wasn’t BS-ing when I said we could do more in four hours than that other SEO company was doing in 12 months, and so could you. I hope that’s helpful and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.