Will Drastic change in keyword across tags and content change search engine ranking?

Marketing
1

I worked hard on content for my website Ananya SEO Services for months, until it reached first or second position in SERP for search for ‘seo agency bangalore’

I was disappointed by low organic traffic. I kept mulling over changing ‘agency’ to ‘company’, but thought ‘why upset the apple cart?’.

One restless midnight, on 27 Feb 2010, I mustered courage and took the decision on drastic change : out went ‘agency’ in body text, titles and tags, replaced by ‘company’.

I am intrigued to note that even today, 7 March 2010, my site is ranked No 1 or 2 for ‘seo agency bangalore’ and 33rd position for ‘seo agency india’ :slight_smile:

So my advice is to ago ahead and take some risk once your website is ranked high and gets page rank 2 or more

2

I agree with you to take some risk but I don’t really think there is to much risk to change a target keyword that you worked hard on for months only to get little or no traffic. I think changing your focus was the right move. Good luck!

3

Keep in mind that your pagerank has very little to do with your ranking. It’s primarily used to determine the depth and frequency of indexing. Additionally, Google maintains a list of synonyms. So ranking your site on the word company may also show when a user searches for the word agency. Granted they’re not exactly the same, they’re interchangeable to the general public.

I’m glad to hear that you’re rankings have stayed high. Keep up the good work.

4

Thanks for the supportive comments. They open up interesting thread on synonyms.

If Google maintains list of synonyms, how would one explain the fact that the site ananya-seo-services is not found in first 200 results for ‘seo company india’ even after replacing ‘agency’ with ‘company’? It ranks 184 for ‘seo company bangalore’. Before the change, it did not rank in 200 for either of the phrases.

I suspect one reason could be the very high competition for ‘seo company india’ as compared to ‘seo agency india’.

5

You obviously know your business because that’s most likely the reason. When you selected these phrases to target, how much research did you do on how many searches they get and how much competition there was for them?

6

Thanks for asking. Here is the SEO journey of the site :

For keyword research I tried Wordtracker and Adwords Keywords Tool. I was not satisfied with Wordtracker (I got full ver on trial). It gave poor results for staffing company website, and I realized from web search that search traffic is anyway not revealed by any search engine. Then on, I’ve been using only Adwords - neat interface, though overly optimistic estimated traffic (to entice you to advertise with PPC :)).

To select keywords, I used following metrics :

  • search volume
  • all in title
  • all in anchor
  • website with exact phrase

I finally selected moderately competitive keyword phrases for homepage :
Primary keyword : search engine optimization agency
secondary keyword : search engine optimization services

‘moderately competitive keyword’ being defined as

Exact Search : 100 to 200,000
Google Allinanchor: 1000 to 20,000
Google Allintitle : 1000 to 20,000

Word ‘bangalore’ occurred only in contact us page, if I recall right. ‘India’ was appended to ‘search engine optimization agency’ in few occurances in homepage.

SEO for NGOs being niche, I added page ‘SEO for social sector’. After 1 month of submitting sitepage, this page was ranked top for term ‘SEO for social sector’ and ranked 14th for ‘seo for NGO’ .

After 4 months, site was not found in top 80 positions for ‘search engine optimization agency’ and ‘search engine optimization services’ on Google and Yahoo.

But the good news was that Google rank for ‘seo agency bangalore’ was 12. For ‘seo agency india’ it was ranked No. 42. You will note that these exact phrases were not used in site at all.

Of course, this ranking was achieved with some press releases and directory submissions. All ethical SEO techniques!