SEO Case Study: Month 11 Results
May 20, 2011 Posted by Tyler CruzLike last month, I’m a few days early in posting an update on this post series, but I just woke up, have a hot coffee on my desk, and am more or less ready to go.
Writing the title of this blog post made me realize just how long I’ve been ‘working’ on SEO. It’s been 11 months already.. wow. That really puts things into perspective for me – I know SEO is all about patience, but 1 year (nearly) is really a very long time!
I started these SEO case study regarding web design for franchises back in mid-November of 2010, and now provide monthly updates on how my various SEO campaigns are faring.
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.
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.
SEO Firm Keywords
Unfortunately, my 2 RankPay keywords did not really see any improvement.
While one of them jumped up close to 100 spots from around #250 to #150, it is still inconsistent – sometimes not ranking at all.
And the other keyword saw a drop of around 10 spots, in the #95-105 range.
The best part about RankPay is that you only pay for results… so I’ve never had to pay them a dime so far. This is why I decided to target those 2 competitive keywords in the first place and go about the process of Negative link removal before anything else – there’s no risk on my end. I’ll either start ranking in the top 30+ and pay for the results, or I won’t have to pay anything.
RankPay has been continuing to update me on my campaigns and are really pushing me to try keywords other than the 2 I’ve been using so far, as they are extremely competitive. I’ve been looking for other, less-competitive keywords to test with them, but can’t really find any good candidates that will be worth the cost.
Nevertheless, I may still find a couple of new keywords I can add to the test.
New SEO Guy: 1 Month Later
In my previous update, I reported how the new freelance SEO guy I hired was doing absolutely awesome so far.
In the post, I showed the results in the image below of my affiliate site’s rankings LESS THAN 24-HOURS AFTER HIRING HIM:
Please remember that these stats were from around April 1st – 3rd, not this most recent update.
By the end of his first month, he had delivered absolutely awesome results. Insane results. Ridiculous results.
And so, I was naturally very curious and in anticipation as to what he would (could) do in his second month.
In short, he continued to deliver great results to my affiliate site, however I saw absolutely no improvement on my movie site.
I just asked him about this, and he believes it is mainly due to me refusing to change my META and TITLE tags. I thought that Google and the search engines have increasingly put less weight into those over time, but I did make those changes on my affiliate site and have only seen great improvement so far, so as of a few minutes ago I decided to go ahead and follow his advice and change them on my movie site.
He said that I should see results within a few days… so I’ll wait and see what happens. If I don’t see any improvement after about a week, I’ll revert them to what they were.
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 |
| Month #11 | 4 | $240 |
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.
For example, this post is about 4 days early, so I could have possibly made 1-2 extra leads during that time.
With the highest rankings I’ve received for my affiliate site to date, I thought that I would have set a new record for SEO income this past month. I guess they have to continue to climb before that will happen.
In any case, I’m still more-or-less breaking even, since I’m only paying $300 a month for SEO. And actually, that cost includes my movie keywords (which I’m not including the income from) so really I’m not losing anything.
Month 11 Update
And away we go!
All of the screenshots below will be of my affiliate site, since my movie site basically saw no change.
Just a reminder that I am currently tracking 13 keywords across 3 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):
This last keyword was the only one which actually saw a drop. It also has the least amount of traffic though, so it’s not a big deal.
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 had taken help from Local Client Takeover – a resource to learn maps seo, to come up with this chart.
I use RankTracker to track and graph all my keywords, and absolutely endorse it 100% if you are doing any kind of SEO work.
Another great month for my affiliate site:
I’m going to request that RankTracker add custom date ranges for the difference comparison feature, or at least add more predefined options, as it’d be nice to show the overall improvement since I hired the new SEO guy.
I did request this before, and they added more predefined ranges, but I’d like them to add more, or ultimately, add exact date ranges.
In any case, this new SEO freelancer has been doing very well so far. I have not seen any real improvement in traffic yet, but I believe we’re right on the cusp of that. If my affiliate rankings continue to improve next month as they have been, then I’ll be very happy and would be very surprised if I didn’t see a new SEO income record as well.
I certainly can’t wait to see what happens.
But, we’ll have to wait, and I’ll have another update for you in another month from now.
26 Responses to “SEO Case Study: Month 11 Results”
Interesting stats. Seems like you made a wise choice in replacing your old guy with this new seo guy!
If only we could hire a personal SEO guy like you can. Don’t have that much money floating around to do that.
I do however enjoy trying to SEO my own blog posts. I’ve seen some results so far. It seems promising. I’ve only been working on it for a week on my blog but I think the more I do it the better my results will be.
So I’ll keep at it and see if I can get some more of my keywords ranked #1 or at least in the first page in Google :).
Good luck to you too Tyler.
Awesome. Goodluck next month picking up some additional affiliate income!
ooops….sorry Michael didn’t mean for that to be a reply to your comment!
I am not surprised at all on the RankPay update, will be interesting to see though in 5 months from now if there is a significant progress on the ranking.
-Jean
Who do you have for your seo guy ? Also who would you choose as a better seo rankypay or the seoguy.
My SEO guy is secret of course! Good freelancers are hard to come by!
As for RankPay vs NewSEOGuy – it’s too soon to compare. I gave RankPay 2 really difficult keywords to try to rank for, and for a new inner page on my site that had no backlinks, etc.
You’re a pie makers and SEO consultant’s wet dream…
“I’m making nothing from hiring you! Yipee! Meta tags? Sure, change ’em, party like it’s ’99! More pie? You betcha! Nom nom nom!”
good job, you upgraded your seo guy and the results are better!
Tyler, you have some interesting stats.. !
SEO is a slow process , but Titles and META descriptions are really important indeed! (META keywords not so much)
Just make sure that the NewSEOGuy isn’t benefitting from the OldSEOGuy’s work though!
Yeah, he doesn’t make me change the META KEYWORDS. He said Google doesn’t care about them and that only Bing does.
That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. Thanks for posting the results, definitely looking good. The new guy seems to be working out pretty well.
Happy to hear the new SEO guy is working out for you still. Hopefully you’ll jump up in rankings soon for your affiliate site and start cashing in 🙂
Nice to hear that your making some progress with your site! Still trying to get the hang of it myself. =p
Your new SEO guy can do magic perhaps. It will be interesting to see if he can improve the movie site’s result in the next few days! Do share with us!
For what it’s worth, you’d see much better results (based on the number of monthly searches for your keywords) if you’d just forked out $147 a month for a LinxBoss subscription for 11 months. (Hint – LOTS of freelance SEO guys use this and charge the earch for the pleasure)
Strong results you got there.
Oh the things I’d love to do to this blog if you hired me 🙂
– enable gzip
– get the browser caching right (not working on 2nd load in IE)
– minify and combine css/js
– use better css selectors since i’m minifying it anyway
The site makes 88 requests and this page is over 1MB in size, you could easily shave a second off load time with some minor changes. That translates into $$$ over time.
Thats so true Car fanatic, I am sure in the future Tyler will look into that himself, its not that hard, I actually did that myself ever since Matt Cutts talked about server load times being a factor.
-Jean
Wow nice study..thats great keep it up…….
Looks like your new seo guy is bringing you some decent results like you said seo is a long tedious process so I hope all your hard work, and research pays off, and your new seo guy keeps delivering.
Thanks for sharing this information. I always thought that online marketing case studies have demonstrated our effectiveness in helping our clients to gain a greater return on their online marketing spend.
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Hi Tyler,
It is never wrong to bring in a new SEO guy, he may have new ideas and perhaps find mistakes and errors that might exist on your blog or web page. But $ 300 a month sounds a bit much, I would recommend you to max to have him for 5-6 months and then not have any SEO guy.
Nice Post Tyler seems like your new guy is really working out for you. Would you recommend Rankpay?
Tyler!
I’ve been feeling pretty sad lately because my blog isn’t ranking as well as it used to. But after reading this I know that sometimes we don’t rank for our key words.
It still hurts! I went from close to 1,000 visitors a day to less than 200. And I’m not even showing up for search terms I used to show up for.