Measuring Incremental SEO Changes

One of the things that many people get frustrated with is measuring the progress of their search engine optimization changes. As we know it can take days, weeks, or even months to see results of the changes made to the site being worked on.

And to make matters even worse, it will also depend on how "important" the search engines see the site as well since a site that is visited by the search bots more frequently will be more likely have the results of the changes show up faster.

Recently I decided to test some incremental changes one by one, the site I was testing on is a site that has been established for some time, has a Pagerank of 4, but does not necessarily get updated daily or even weekly.

Since I am a big believer that the title tag is the most important single item you can do for on-site SEO (feel free to argue that one....) I wanted to modify one pages title tag from something that was less competitive to something that was more competitive but when the site was first launched the site would not of had the link juice to rank for.

The term is still directly related to the site content but is the higher searched version of the product term it focuses on.

One thing I like to look at before measuring anything like this is the number of Google search results for the term based on how a typical user would search for the term and not a techie  (without quotes in other words).

In the case of this term there are around 5 million or so results that show up with a solid range of companies on the first 3 pages. Overtime my goal is page one but for now I want to see what one little tweak can do, can that one tweak take the site from not showing up to showing up for the search (at least in the first few pages) and how fast will that happen, or even will it happen.

After I measure the initial tweaks results then I will do one more change, all "white hat".

Results? Well after just two days the site now shows up on page 3 of the Google SERP's for the term and that is before any further optimization is done and without waiting for any real aging on the term.

It would be completely expected, from past experience, that over time that ranking would do even better without any further optimization, since I have the benefit of time for what I am testing I am scheduling to check the results after one month then two months before making any further changes.

After that I will start to make further optimizations to the site, at times we tend to ignore the fact that we need to measure SEO results over time. We expect fast results and with competitive terms it may take time before you see those results.

Sometimes we get spoiled with long tail search terms ranking fast, but when working with more competitive terms it is best to measure over time and not get frustrated.