TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

vBSEO Case Study "B" Commencement

I decided to go ahead, take the risk, and install vBSEO on PokerForums.org and MovieForums.org.

Like vBulletin, vBSEO offers discounts the more purchases you buy, so I got both of these licenses for $140 each ($10 off). The price is really a non-factor though, my only concern is that I don’t drop for the search term “poker forums” as I’ve been #1 forever. Sometimes I drop to #2 or even #3 once in a blue moon, but Google updates their SERPs often so I bounce around a lot.

And 22% of my search-engine traffic comes from that one term. 4.5% comes from another term, so my only concern of installing vBSEO on PokerForums.org is if I somehow drop in ranking for this term, as it’d hurt my traffic quite a bit.

However, I’ve weighed the risks, and considering my domain name is probably the main reason I’m #1 for “poker forums”, it is very unlikely I will drop in ranking. I also talked to Joe Ward a fair bit on his thoughts and he thinks I should be fine as well.

What should happen, is that I start ranking higher and more often, for smaller “long tail” keywords and phrases. There is strength in numbers, and if I rank better for thousands of smaller terms, that can make a big difference in traffic.

PokerForums.org is my biggest site and has made me over 6-digits, so this move is a major one my friends. Simply, installing vBSEO could potentially net me tens of thousands of dollars.

My other site, MovieForums.org, will also be very interesting to watch. It has secured a solid #3 placement for “movie forums” for quite a while now, and I’m very curious to see if vBSEO will improve me to #2 or even #1. I’m also interested, of course, to see the traffic increase from smaller terms it may or may not yield.

Since running vBSEO on PokerForums.org is such a big deal (at least to me), I will be updating this “B” vBSEO Case Study every month.

 Here is my starting data (uninteresting for now, but is to be used to compare against in two weeks time):

PokerForums.org

Traffic:

August 26 – September 25
Google Organic: 7,254
Yahoo Organic: 828

Indexed Pages:

August 26 – September 25
Google: 43,500
MSN: 150
Yahoo/Fast/AltaVista: 102,002

SERP Results:

– = Not in the first 200 results
G = Google
M = MSN
Y = Yahoo!
“Search Term” [Original] [Last Ranking] [Current Ranking]

“poker forums″  [G 1 M 4 Y 2]
“poker forum″  [G 6 M 16 Y 4]
“online poker forum”  [G 4 M — Y 2]
“poker″  [G — M — Y–]

MovieForums.org

Traffic:

August 26 – September 25
Google Organic: 4,987
Yahoo Organic: 263

Indexed Pages:

August 26 – September 25
Google: 4,330
MSN: 51
Yahoo/Fast/AltaVista: 2,962

SERP Results:

– = Not in the first 200 results
G = Google
M = MSN
Y = Yahoo!
“Search Term” [Original] [Last Ranking] [Current Ranking]

“movie forums” [G 3 M 3 Y –]
“movie forum” [G 3 M 40 Y –]
“movies” [G — M — Y –]

It took me over an hour to grab that data… it’s very hard to get accurate SERP results as 99% of tools are incorrect or don’t work at all. So the only real data I can depend on is the organic traffic, but at least it’s the only data that ultimately matters.

I’ll be back in a month from now to let you know how things go.