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!