SEO Case Study: Month 10 Results
April 23, 2011 Posted by Tyler CruzI’m actually 4 days early in posting this update, but am doing so because I just can’t wait any longer!
You guys will absolutely love this update, and will most likely be salivating over the results I saw during the first week of April.
I started these SEO case study reports back in mid-November of 2010 with the help and support of Socia Sheffield, and now provide monthly updates on how my various SEO campaigns are faring. If you need the best SEO services, organic seo specialists need to be contacted.
If you haven’t seen them already (or simply want to read previous reports in this case study), you can view the previous months here: Month 5 Results, Month 6 Results, Month 7 Results, Month 8 Results, and Month 9 Results.
If you want to skip all the details and get straight to the results, scroll down to the last image, as it gives a fantastic overall summary of last month’s results or take a look at Home Service Direct to know more.
SEO Firm Keywords
My 2 RankPay keywords saw some small improvement over the past month, but are very inconsistent in their rankings. One day they’ll be ranked, then another day they won’t be. This may be because they are still not ranked high enough yet, but it’s still a bit odd.
One of the keywords actually made it to the top 100 a few days ago (#84), but has since dropped out of the top 1,000 again.
I know I’ve mentioned this a lot, but please remember that these 2 keywords I’m targeting are INSANELY competitive, so keep that in mind.
On another note, the founder and CEO of RankPay actually contacted me the other day. Apparently, his team has been following my SEO case study reports – so hello to any of you guys currently reading this.
I’m going to try to set you guys up with a promotional deal with them, giving you some free bonus money when you sign up. I’ll keep you posted on that, but I know that most of you guys are waiting to see some solid results from my own case study with them before you sign up.
Hired New SEO Guy
In my previous update, I had mentioned how I finally fired my first SEO guy and was about to hire a new one.
Well, I did hire a new guy an, and he started on April 1st, and… well… *in a Kelsey Grammar voice* GOOD LORD!
I’ll summarize his results with a simple screenshot of my affiliate site’s rankings LESS THAN 24-HOURS AFTER HIRING HIM:
What? Isn’t SEO supposed to be a long wait? What’s up with the immediate effects?
The first thing my new SEO guy did was had me change my on-page SEO by editing my META and TITLE tags. I agreed to do this, as I wanted to give this new guy a fresh level of trust, even though my last SEO guy gave less than stellar results.
So, such a change could explain the immediate and dramatic boost in rankings. However, it doesn’t explain why my movie site, in which I didn’t edit any of my on-page SEO, also saw an equal amount of improvement overnight.
Excited, I eagerly awaited 12:01am each night, where I run my prized RankTracker software to check my keyword rankings. Amazingly, my rankings only continued to improve over the next week. In fact, I improved dramatically on almost every keyword all the engines. Wow.
What’s more, is that I’m paying this new guy a fair bit less than what I was paying my previous guy!
SEO Income
Since this case study series is beginning to collect more data, I am now displaying the SEO income from my affiliate site in a table format for easier viewing:
| Month of SEO | # of Leads | Approximate Value |
| Month #6 | 5 | $300 |
| Month #7 | 1 | $60 |
| Month #8 | 2 | $120 |
| Month #9 | 5 | $300 |
| Month #10 | 5 | $300 |
Please note that since I don’t always publish these updates every 30-days exactly, that these numbers are a bit off due to overlapping, having a bit of a gap, and whatnot.
To be honest, I was rather surprised that I didn’t see much higher numbers during the past weeks since I saw a great increase in my rankings. 3 out of 8 of my affiliate keywords were in the top 10, with one of them at #2, and I really thought I was going to see 3-4 leads per week, but they just didn’t come in.
I only noticed the tiniest increase in traffic, so it makes sense. It just goes to show that you really need to be ranked high in order to get any decent sort of traffic from natural search result traffic.
Nevertheless, I’m hoping that month #11 will set a new record for SEO affiliate income.
Month 10 Update
This portion of my SEO case study is extra-interesting this time around due to the dramatically fast improvement once I hired my new SEO guy:
The first image is of Google Webmaster Tool’s traffic graph for my Google keywords of my affiliate site. The Y-axis is the amount of impressions, so it’s really not that special, but does show an improvement:
The following images are of some of my various affiliate keywords.
Just a reminder that I am currently tracking 13 keywords across 3 search engines and it is important to know our progress and positing in for search engines, so I won’t be able to focus on every single keyword, and will therefore focus only on the ones that show the most change (good or bad).
Noticing a trend yet? 😉
These were all for Google. My Bing/Yahoo results saw good improvement on my affiliate site, but rather bad drops on my movie site. Who knows why.
Overview Chart
And last but not least, here is a very nice overview comparison chart of both my sites from both 1 month ago and 6 months ago, as compared with today.
I use RankTracker to track and graph all my keywords, and I absolutely endorse it 100% if you are doing any kind of SEO work.
What a month, what a month! And remember, my new SEO guy was only hired 22 days ago…
I really hope that this wasn’t a fluke or a one-hit wonder and that next month will see great progression as well. I certainly can’t wait to see what happens. My SEO guy is certainly optimistic.
In fact, before I hired him, he offered to work on the keywords on a performance basis – meaning that I would only pay him if and when they hit the top 10. However, since that would add up to a fair bit more, I went with the monthly package instead. His initial estimation is that it would take 3 months to get in the top 10.
I was very cautiously optimistic in the beginning, but after seeing his results so far, I think that he might actually be able to do it… also, he said that if in 3 months I am not in the top 10, that he will continue to work on the keywords free of charge until I am.
Is this guy Superman?
Anyhow, you guys will have to stay tuned for next month’s SEO report. It could be a real doozy. I know I can’t wait.
On page SEO has less and less value these days. The links hes doing for your sites are much more valuable and have more PR than the last guy you had in my opinion.
Good luck!
I disagree. I think unique and good title tags are still very important.
True! Meta keywords are sorta done with, but I think Title tags still have a big impact.
It would be helpful to find out where he is getting links from and how many per day or week. You report show really good results, but he is doing exactly is a mystery…
There sure is some significant improvement in terms of SEO. This new guy must really be doing something special 🙂
Very nice results. I’ve been waiting for you to post this. I downloaded RankTracker and I’m using the free version right now, but I think I might buy the full version. Very good software for tracking your progress. I’m working on some SEO campaigns of my own for my affiliate manager blog and find it very useful. Thanks for the recommendation!
Hi Tyler I really happy with your result and how much do you pay for your new seo guy?
$300/month.
Im assuming that is $300 plus expenses. right?
Ahh ok.. it’s cool result for $300 a month. Keep updating.
Do you have info on what he was able to generate for in terms of incoming links and other off-page stuff?
Good to hear that Tyler! Are you ever going to reveal the product that you are selling and grabbing those $60 commissions on?? or will that be held private??
That will always be private.
I’m just curious as to why people never say. Wouldn’t it benefit you to have more people know about the sites in which you’re promoting things?
I don’t want people to enter the niche market I’m in. It’d make a difference in my earnings.
In reply to Ryan,
I’ll cite a personal example of why you shouldn’t share everything about your site.
I had a site that was making 1k a month. I told people about it,
then within a week I have 10 clones of my site competing for the same keywords, in which they stole alot the traffic, dropping my earnings down to $300/mo.
it hurts cause you share this information to help people, then they go and ruin it for you.
Smart decision. I’ve had similar things happen.
This post is sigh-worthy even for you.
How long have you been an “Internet entrepreneur”? In all those years have you seriously not even picked up the most basic of knowledge that would let you know that 24 hours is far too short of a time period for anyone to impact your SEO results, especially from just fiddling with meta tags?
If you can take a break from more important tasks such as eating pie you might run a Google search on “Google Panda update”. Yes, really, put the slice of pie down. Read a little, then look at your traffic graphs, then resist the temptation to eat more pie.
The last 45 days has seen a ton of flux in Google results as they rolled out the Panda update to the algorithm in late Feb/early March. They’ve since rolled it out to more data centers and tweaked it some, so many sites are seeing pretty dramatic fluctuations in search traffic.
Or, you know, don’t bother and keep shoveling money to your new crack SEO guy.
This sums up my thoughts exactly. Google Panda obviously looked on your sites favorably. If I were you I would hire the old SEO guys because Panda obviously liked what they were doing.
I’ve seen top rankings within 6 hours, for keywords like “mortgage loans”
for Google news sites. When you do it right, it can happen fast.
No SEO efforts in the world will impact anyone’s rankings for terms such as “mortgage loans” in the primary Google search results in 6 hours. Bzzt. Wrong answer. Go sit in the corner and eat pie with Tyler.
**Granted listings only last a hours/days at most.
Once your site is approved as a “google news site” by google. Within minutes you can rank for most terms, because google places “news’ within the top 10 results. and there are only like 20k publishers to compete with, so it’s alot easier.
Check it out out NOW, “mortgage loans”
Google news pops up as listings
#4-6 are “Google news sites”,
hint hint, wink wink.
Notice anything?
But to get a “Google news” approved, you need like 6 author posting stories all day, 5-10+ posts, premium quality. One whiff of junk will get you tossed out. or you can try to buy a approved site 30k lol.
this method is being spammed to death now, so it’s near to impossible to become news approved.
I just don’t like closed-minded thinking.
You learn something new everyday Sigh eh 😉
Bzzt, wrong answer. Get back to the pie-eating corner.
Tyler’s post is about all the cash he’s burning trying to improve his keyword rankings in organic search results — and nearly breaking his hand patting himself on the back for hiring a whizkid that modified some meta tags and improved his rankings within hours.
Nowhere does he mention trying to game the system by temporarily getting in junk Google News listings that drop out within a few hours.
Moral of the story: no SEO in the world will improve your organic search results in 24 hours or less.
I’d keep a close eye on where your links are coming from. I’ve never seen results like that outside of a link farm network – which is fine if you’re willing to take that risk.
Alot of the results looked like they dipped for a couple days during March and happened to jump back up to where they were prior to the new SEO guy.
Does he detail how he is building backlinks? Does he provide you a summary of what backlinks (with URLs) that he builds every month?
Nice to see the keywords moving in the right direction, but would me more interested to see next months update to see if this rise continues.
goodluck
SEO results are great, very impressive & helpful.
Hi tyler, your statistic since you hired the SEO guy is pretty doing well. The inconsistent rankings is basically because of the Google algorithm updates. That’s what SEO is for – ranked high in order to get high traffic. I’m hoping for the next update on your report.
Wow, those results are surely impressive! I can’t wait to see how you are doing next month, do share with us! 🙂
No way did the new guy have this effect, its just not possible in that timeframe. Whatever the old SACKED guy did just took effect.
These are interesting results Tyler.
I hope you can keep us updated with the next results.
Thanks for the report.
[…] If you haven’t seen them already (or simply want to read previous reports in this case study), you can view the previous months here: Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, Month 9, and Month 10. […]
Interesting study. Finding the right SEO guy takes a long time. I had a real issue with this and spent too much money on virtually nothing.
Incredible points. Solid arguments. Keep up the good work.