One Page 1 For 10 Months Now – A Follow Up

[MD Clean]

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Hi all,

Well it has been 10 months since hitting Page 1 for my bestest Keyword and I wanted to share the highlights with you.

You can find the original thread here: http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/forums/index.php?threads/1st-time-ever-on-page1-of-google-today.32921/

If you look at my site, please don’t judge me for not implementing my plans this year… it has been a big year and I will get to them!

So here is how being on Page 1 of Google has affected my business in 10 months.

1. Increased New Business. Business has more than doubled.
2. Increased Goodwill. It follows that the business valuation has also more than doubled.
3. New Partner. I have already actually unlocked some of the cash tied up in 2. Above by selling a share of the business. My business partner is ecstatic about the growth trajectory we are on and the SERPS were a large reason why he had confidence in the business.
4.Improved Credibility. We are a business to business offering. We are about to start work for the Gold Coast’s largest business… my theory is that people make a psychological leap when they see your listing near the top of the rankings in Google – it improves your credibility and as a result you get to work with bigger clients which in turn boosts profitability and business valuation.
5.Out of Control Growth Trajectory. Well, the phone doesn’t stop ringing and we are taking on new business all of the time. We have a constant, in-built sales funnel. In-fact, we have turned off Adwords for the time being because we can only handle so much new business at any one time.
6.Better SEO Results. We continued to grow in SERPS and are comfortably in the top 3 organic results for ALL of our major keywords now – mainly #2 or #1 (in that order).

I would love to hear any similar success stories from SEO’s here… go ahead, do your worst.

[kangaroojosh]

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Awesome! Thanks for sharing your experience with being up there for quite a while. Most do not find time to come back and continue sharing. Well done on the achievement and I recon since you have a stronghold now, you should continue your online and offline activity as maintaining the ranks are important too. Good luck with your business and it is very encouraging, each time you hear how big impact the online presence has on your offline business.

Cheers
Josh

[MD Clean]

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kangaroojosh, post: 222734, member: 59996 wrote:

Awesome! Thanks for sharing your experience with being up there for quite a while.

Cheers
Josh

Thanks for the kind words Josh,

One of the great things about the results is that ALL of our marketing efforts have been online and totally PASSIVE… if they don’t click and then call, we don’t get new business. But….

We have been getting a lot of new business!

I do not have a single flyer, postcard, or ad anywhere else except through the site.

Agree that I need to improve efforts to stay high in the SERPS. I did finish one new page on Saturday and after a crawl, it landed on Page 3 of Google. I am hoping it will climb quickly from here.

[jtco]

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Well done MD. It’s good to get there huh!

Keep up the hard work, you don’t want to lose your spot now

[JonTinkler]

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That’s great work Paul, well done. Not easy to achieve in that amount of time, particularly if you’re in a competitive niche.

If I can do a little trumpet blowing myself, at the end of November last year, our main keywords were out of the top 100. I decided I wanted them on page 1 by the end of 2015.

They’re at around 15 now, and one just cracked the first page a couple of days ago before slipping off again.

Still hoping we can get there – 2 months and 3 days to go! Can’t wait for it to happen.

Well done and keep up the great work

[MD Clean]

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Hi John,

As a business owner, it is very exciting to see it happen. Savor the moment when it does!

I would like to swap notes sometime if you would like.

Good luck

Paul

[Byron Trzeciak]

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Congrats MD, things are going really well for you and it’s a great success story for SEO and the value of it.

For everyone’s benefit can you highlight the areas that you worked on with your website that you felt had the biggest impact on your ranking?

I think many business owners to expect first page rankings to happen immediately so the fact that it took you 10 months is very similar to what I’ve seen also especially when focusing purely on onsite optimisation and content.

[MD Clean]

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Byron Trzeciak, post: 223038, member: 56118 wrote:

Congrats MD, things are going really well for you and it’s a great success story for SEO and the value of it.

For everyone’s benefit can you highlight the areas that you worked on with your website that you felt had the biggest impact on your ranking?

I think many business owners to expect first page rankings to happen immediately so the fact that it took you 10 months is very similar to what I’ve seen also especially when focusing purely on onsite optimisation and content.
Hi Byron,

Just for clarification. I first constructed the site in March 14 and hit the 1st page of results in December 14 and have been 1st, 2nd or 3rd result in all of my key words for 10 continuous months now.

Although it is impossible to know exactly what Google is thinking, I believe that my site has benefited most by:

1.Google Algo changes – a lot of sites that used to dominate the top spots across keywords are now on page 2 and 3. Some have used questionable SEO tactics and some are non-responsive sites and or slow to load.

2. Unique content across the site – I have 20+ pages all with unique copy.

3. I followed the book per MOZ etc for best practice so I worked on having strong title tags, good use of H1 (closely aligning to keywords eg, where I wanted to say something like “Director of First Impressions” in the H1 for my Office Cleaning Page, I used instead, “Expert and Affordable Office Cleaning For Gold Coast Business” so that the keyword is in the H1), internal links throughout the site, a lot of content ie 20+ pages etc and worked on page loading speed etc.

4. I even created unique copy for every citation – I don’t know if Google distinguishes the copy on citation sites or not but I wanted to err on the uber conservative side.

5. Natural copy – I don’t spam my own pages with keywords.

My business covers the sixth largest city in the country so I imagine it would be easier to rank well for regions such as the Northern Beaches and much easier for single suburbs, although much harder for Sydney or Melbourne etc.

[Byron Trzeciak]

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Thanks Paul.

In terms of learning SEO and your time spent on copy, tweaking, refining your onsite can you provide a rough indication of how many hours you think you spent in those 10 months or so months? Maybe an estimation of time per week or time per month?

[MD Clean]

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To start from scratch I estimate I spent about 150 hours researching everything from SEO to colours to which theme and plugins to use to what size fonts to use to how to write effective copy etc, etc

Then about 100 hours building the site and writing copy etc

Since it was first published, only another 25 hours in total creating a few blog posts and adding a few new pages.

And I had a guy do my PPC for me and have spent only 3 hours or so in total checking up on it.

To do it all again 1 time, I would spend half the time.

To learn a single theme and work with that theme 10 times, things would speed up considerably. I think between 30-50 hours total including external citations, establishment of PPC.

That would be for a 20 page site. I don’t have things like email lists, offer landing pages, Facebook ads, twitter or Pinterest accounts, email templates, newsletters, podcasts, webinars etc which would all take extra time.

But….

I have essentially, a static offering that does not vary much over time so once it is up and running, nothing much NEEDS to be done to it except for housekeeping.

[Author]

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