SEO Case Study 5: Unattended Results

What happens when you track a keyword that's been left to fend for itself? Well, that's what SEO Case Study 5 is all about.

There's a couple of keywords I've been monitoring on a client website that I haven't been doing any work on.

Why would I monitor these keywords, I hear you ask? Well, for two reasons.

1. In case we did any work in the future and I had a benchmark of where we came from.
2. As a case study.

And of course, for the third reason that deep down, I'm an SEO nerd.

Unattended Keyword One

Remembering that the blue line is the one we're looking at, this graph shows the random meandering of a lost and lonely keyword. Obviously Google is finding something within the site to deliver a level of authority to have the site bouncing around 7 to 53, not the value it sees isn't consistent.

It's interesting the site made it up to the heights of 7th without any support whatsoever, but of course, in these circumstances, it doesn't take long for the keyword to plunge back to the depths of nothingness. Or in this case, page 3.

Of course its somewhat frustrating watching this happen over the course of many months when you know that some simple site work, some focus on content, headers and titles and some backlinks could make this much more stable and successful.

Unattended Keyword Two

I like this one because not only is there a great interaction with the main competitor we were tracking but because of the stuttering success of the keyword.

Bear in mind that nothing was done on this keyword too and this even made it up to position 4!

The problem here is that the keyword won't stay in the search results. My guess here is that it's appearing and ranking for a small bunch of internet users infrequently, but not appearing for others. This might be location based, previous history from the visitor or a number of other reasons. Some of those reasons it keeps vanishing might even be technical - with a slow-loading site on a shared server, Google might be punishing it when the server is congested.

Suffice to say, whilst it's had its moment in the sun, it's not achieving a great deal as it disappears out of the results for days, if not weeks, on end. Even now it appears to have vanished completely.

Remember though: even a badly optimised, slow-loading website can rank well even if Google thinks the content on the page is not only a good match for what the user is searching for, but better content than the most speedy and well-optimised of sites. That might sound ridiculous but Google's goal is to deliver a good experience to the viewer and that might mean sending them to a site that lacks in certain areas.

To Conclude Our SEO Case Study

This SEO case study is a bit more than just pretty graphs. Or just 'graphs' if you don't find that sort of thing aesthetically pleasing.

The focus here is that keywords and ranking can occur without any intervention or support, but they're rarely sustainable. They're also frequently susceptible to competitor activity. If you have no-one working on building the authority of the website through backlinks and content, then you're up to the mercy of a Google algorythm that is getting smarter and smarter.

If you want to go back and re-read another SEO case study, then I have plenty of others that could be applicable to your business. If you're looking for an SEO Consultant, then please email me on simon@flypaperplanes.co.

Photo by Jeremy Cai on Unsplash