One Day to Reach Page One in Google SERPS?

A little story of how sometimes, getting to page one on Google is not as straight forward as it may at first appear…

About a week ago Pat Marchand from 24-7petshops.com was searching Google for websites related to ‘Learning SEO’.  She stumbled upon Interleado.com and subscribed to the SEO Workbench to receive a comprehensive analysis of her website’s content, backlinks and competitors.

Pat’s goal in doing all of this was to understand why she could not get a better ranking for her top keyword, ‘parrot cage’. She had been trying for the previous 6 months, using her own time and skill and using BT’s SEO service. She got off to an encouraging start, she  found the site positioned on page nine. Over the next 6 months it bobbled between page  nine and page eight, but she could never get any closer to the elusive page one.

So, getting ever frustrated at her websites lack of progress she ran the SEO Workbench against it. When she looked at the analysis she found nothing out of place, most of the SEO factors were aligned correctly for her target keywords. Pat’s next step was to ask Interleado to have a look at the report and advise her what the next steps should be.  Interleado scheduled a one hour webinar with Pat to ask her some questions and look for clues as to what might be keeping her website from progressing.

Before the webinar we had a look at the sitemap for www.24-7pershop.com and noticed that it seemed out of date, one of the key pages was not referenced. During the webinar, Interleado was granted access to the Google Webmasters account for Pat’s website. In here we found that Google had had issues accessing the existing sitemap. We got Pat to re-configure the site map and re-submit it to Google. We agreed some other tasks, but that was the main one.

24 hours later, we received a voice mail from Pat – she had gone from page nine to page one in one day for her target keyword ‘parrot cage’ – by simply updating her sitemap and re-submitting it to Google. She had spent a lot of time and money during the previous six months trying to get that illusive page one ranking. But would this last, after all you don’t go from page nine to page one overnight, or do you?

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What will this be worth in real terms? Well there are 74,000 monthly searches in the UK for ‘parrot cage’ (Google Keyword Tool). At position 3 in the results and based on eye-tracking stats, Pat should be getting about 10% of those searches, or 7400 per day.

Now, we are not saying that this is going to be the result for all website’s and Pat had obviously put in a lot of ground work on the content side.

Unless you have a very methodical approach to your SEO you may be missing vital parts of the puzzle that go into making a page one website.

Another very interesting fact about this case is that Pat realises that this is really only the beginning, she needs now to up the pace to remain in position 3 and strive for position 1.

This foresight was borne out when after spending one day at number 3 on Google.co.uk, the Google dance appears to have kicked in again and dropped the site again. I see this a lot when changes are initially made to a website, it gets a boost and then drops again. We’ll have to wait for about 2/3 weeks to see how this one pans out, but I would expect a big increase in visibility.

Email quote from Pat Marchand , owner www.24-7petshop.com

‘Do you know I have paid so much money in Seo since last June, money and money badly spent because it was not leading anywhere… then I met you and within a day, thanks to you I have reached the top and on a site which has only be live since June 2009… 9 months ah ah ah!

I really need to stay entirely with your services as this is gold, no lies.’

Stay tuned for more reports on this fasinating case study of getting to Page One on Google.

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