SEO Easy Pickings (blog post from Dave Collins)

Discussions
#1

Dave Collins’ latest how-to blog post is pure gold in my opinion. An excerpt:

Realistically it’s going to take a lot of work to improve your position from position 50 to the top five, but improving from position seven to five is not only doable, but should produce significant results.

Read it here: https://www.softwarepromotions.com/news/seo-easy-pickings/

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#2

Interesting concept, thanks for sharing!

Haha, I like his humor “On a Mac you hit the FUNCTION KEY then GET-YOURSELF-A-PC. Sorry.”

#3

This sounds like it might be useful, but I feel like his emphasised text “builds on existing strengths” in the blog post should be linked to a post that cites evidence for the assertion that it’s easier to rise through these positions…

If anything I find the opposite to what Dave claims.

#4

This is what I understood from the article:

  • You’ve got web page A, ranking at Google result #20 for keyword X. You are obsessively trying to get to position 1, 2, or 3.
  • You’ve also got web page B, ranking at Google result #5 for keyword Y. You didn’t realise this until you followed Dave’s tips to discover this. That is, without trying you are accidentally doing really well for a keyword.

Getting page A from position 20 to position 3 will be much harder than getting page B from position 5 to position 3, given that you’ve accidentally already done pretty well for page B/keyword Y.

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#5

Oh, I see, yes I didn’t perceive that logic, thanks for pointing it out.

#6

To follow up after six weeks: using this strategy I’ve improved our Google ranking for a slew of keywords I didn’t even know of until recently. Here’s an example for one of our landing pages:

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 12.06.38 PM.png692×241 25.3 KB

(I’ve hidden the keywords, but if you really want to know, they are all variations on “poker hud for 888poker” and all lead to https://pokercopilot.com/poker-hud-for-888poker)

As you can see, in six weeks, we’ve moved to the top three Google positions.

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#7

What sort of volumes are we talking about?

I tried this, but most of the “accidental” keywords don’t amount to much…

#8

What sort of volumes are we talking about?

Low volumes indeed. But enough for it to be worth my time.

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#9

Wow, great work, and thanks for the follow-up post! So the big question is…how much traffic did that incremental increase give you? Keeping the keywords private, do you know traffic before and after from each?

#10

Did you add new pages or tweak existing pages? Or both?

#11

Tweaked existing pages. For the landing page I mentioned earlier I did the following:

  • Changed the page main heading to add a benefit to the customer.
  • Changed the description meta tag as that seems to be what Google is showing for the page’s snippet.
  • Got rid of some rambling intro paragraph that didn’t seem to contain anything to do with the performing keywords
  • Changed phrasing throughout the article to match the keywords people were actually used.
  • Moved my call to action (download buttons) from the bottom of the page to the top of the page, hoping to increase conversions, but also to reduce bounce, which apparently Google cares about.

BTW, Andy, I’ve been using your own site’s landing pages for specific event types as a model of how to do this stuff right.

#12

Thanks. I’m also going to target some mid-ranking keywords as Dave suggested in the post. But I am a bit nervous about tweaking existing pages substantially. So I will probably create new pages and just do minor tweaks to existing pages.

I’m planning to do a load of similar pages for Hyper Plan. I’m just trying to find the time/energy/enthusiasm!

#13

Tell me about it! It requires some mental creativity to make each page useful while avoiding duplicating too much content.

#14

Thanks. Would you mind me asking - are we talking about 100s of visits per month. 1000s? And how many pages/keywords?

I’m not in your market, just trying to understand, because for me, most of the time, doing this kind of thing doesn’t derive high enough volumes. Depends on the variety of keywords applicable to your market I suppose, and your CRs.