The Forum SEO Challenge...

Not forgotten you Sandra, was just waiting till we had a months worth of data.

So to recap:
Start Date: 4th November
Target Keyword: UK Business Forum
Orginal Google Position: 37 (page 4)
SEO Company: Innocent Advertising

As of 3rd December
Google Position 6 (page 1)

Great progress, and the top 3 spots are all occupied by UKBF (how do they do that??)

So from an SEO perspective, great job.

But, the $10,000 question, what's the verdict from a marketing perspective.

Had to triple check this, as we had an odd coincidence, but I've compared stats from October and November.

October - we had 253 new members. November - we had 253 new members!

• Decrease in traffic by 6.49%
• Decrease in pageviews by 7.43%
• An increase in new visitors by 8.75%

Traffic Sources:

• Direct traffic down 14.88%
• Search Engines down by 7.15% (Google down by 12%)
• Referring Sites up by 16.20% (This was facebook)

So the bad news is traffic has dropped slightly in a 30 day period. But the good news is that new visitors actually increased, and although slightly less traffic, we achieved exactly the same number of new members.

The Keyword Phrase UK Business Forum generated 2 visits in October with no sign ups, and 142 visits in November which converted into 1 new member

Traffic didn't really start for this key phrase until Sunday 14th Nov, which ties in with when it arrived on Page 1.

ROI

1. SEO - So if I was paying for this, one months SEO so far would have generated 142 visitors, of which 1 person would have signed up.

But I would expect month 2 to generate more visitors, potentially double, with maybe 2 -3 new members. How this ties in with your SEO spend is dependant on your own product and services, and how much a conversion is worth to you.

2. Social Networking - During November, I also incorporated the Facebook Like buttons on posts.

In October, Facebook generated 3 visitors, with no conversions. In November it generated 150 visitors with no conversions. It will be interesting to see how this grows over time.


Summary

The SEO experiment is working fantasticly, and hats off to Innocent Advertising, who have got a keyword from page 4 to mid page 1 in less than a month. It will be interesting to see if this creeps up any further.

But value wise, in this particular case, the Facebook implementation has actually generated more visitors (traffic) albeit no new members, and was completely free.

So if I was paying for this service, I think I would be seriously analyzing the keyword phrase I'm having optimised, as it's not as popular as I assumed it was. But I also believe you need to give SEO a fair chance, and when optimising new keywords, I personally like to give them 90 days, which give you plenty of feedback and statistics.

But if you are in the market for some professional SEO, if nothing else, make sure you do your homework first before getting your wallet out

Hopefully some of you will find this of use, especially if you are new to SEO, and I'll update the stats again in 30 days.

...and remember, don't forget social networking, as social and search start to merge....

Its good to see the results you are getting using SEO

If I can point something out, the majority of people searching on that phrase will be looking (IMO) specifically for UKBF and not a forum based in the UK (eg uk business forum). That's just what I believe to be the case and why it won't convert quite as good which was my original point about conversion.

That's like me being No. 2 for Ferrari. Sure, it may have a lot of searches, but those people want the Ferrari website, and may only look at mine out of curiosity. Hope that explains my analogy of what I mean.

I end up on a forum almost always because of the question I have typed, be that a PC forum (more often than not in my case ) or any other forum. People dont generally search for a forum because they want to find online forums; not in the main anyhow. They search on a topic, question or whatever, and the search engine results throws up the forum.

If it's business related and your forum happens to have that same phrase, then voila! This is why some forums will edit thread titles from 'ltd company accounts problem' to 'How to fill in a CT600'.

If I had the time, and it was my forum, that's what I would be doing to slowly but surely attract traffic and thus conversion to sign up.

As you guys have said there are many factors that determine whether your site gets a good number of visitors and conversions when using a particular keyword. Things such as what the site is about, the name of the site, the feel of the site once someone clicks through, the name of the sites around yours etc.

I think the fact that UKBF occupy the top 3 spots is having an impact on the number of people who come through to this site. For one, the name of the site is the exact name of the word being searched for and two they have the top 3 spots (which I feel will help the no end).

Just to clarify that the aim of this challenge was to get the site ranking on the 1st page for a particular keyword. We were giving a batch of words to chose from and picked one just to prove we could get it there. We did not take into consideration the potential traffic numbers or we would have gone for one of the other keywords that got 4x as many searches each month. As you say Steve and Sandra, the keyword someone picks is crucial to the success of the SEO. There is no point in being on the 1st page just for the sake of it.

Yup agree totally, but object of the thread is an SEO experiment, not a specific full on marketing drive for MLF, otherwise would have spent more time researching a key phrase. This particular phrase is something we ranked no where on, and haven't optimised for in the past.

But it's nice to measure stats, and monitor performance to see what or if there was any impact.

Organic traffic does indeed come via thread titles, and just noticed my favourite buzz phrase of the minute "reputational economics" has us at Google number 2, and is a steady source of visitors.

But interesting take on manipulating thread titles though, must admit, hadn't considered that

Growth wise though, as we're approaching 12 months old, quite happy with the rate, although key as with most biz forums is encouraging single post wonders to contribute a bit more and increasing the number of you regulars who are the backbone of any forum

But hopefully the thread shows an insight to the inner workings of SEO, and like you say, keyword selection is paramount.

Interesting thread for sure - but full kudos to Innocent Advertising for doing what they said on the tin - put themselves out there for all to see

Very interesting thread. A good effort there I think for sure. For some competitive keywords I'm still working on my climb up the Google rankings. Looking at Bookkeeper London I'm on page 5 but London Bookkeeper on page 3. I've improved this from about pages 10 and 13 respectively in the last few weeks. Hopefully at some stage in Jan or Feb (or March....) I can get to page 1.
Of course some phrases are a lot easier to get on page 1 - with minimal effort and no off-page SEO I got bookkeeper Hammersmith and bookkeeper Fulham on page 1 of Google (for London Bookkeepers - Bookkeepers across the UK - Accounting Bookkeeping Services).
I don't get much traffic from these being on Page 1 but I do anticipate that the effort will be worth it when I can get on Page 1 for Bookkeeper London.

I think I'll take on board the facebook suggestion and look into this soon as well.....

Cheers

Hi Guys (Happy Christmas).

Just a quick update.

We have not done any work on the site now for a few weeks. There have been a few reasons for this.

1 - We wanted to see how the keyword for this site would hold up if SEO was reduced or stopped. The verdict is that it started to fall.

2 - We have had a load of work come through which has been taking up all of our time

3 - I have been on my honeymoon for the last 10 days and the wife would not forgive me if I looked at a computer let alone did any work.

The site has not held up all that well without any work being carried out on it. It has fallen down to about 8th place on the 1st page from a position of 5th. However, I don't think it would take all that much effort to get it back up to 5th.

At the moment we really don't have all that much time to dedicate to this challenge as we have had a load of big projects come through which we have been dedicating our time too.

If we get a spare moment we will do a bit more but the main aim of this challenge was to get the site on the 1st page for the selected keyword, which we did in about 10 days (I think).

I think 3rd or 4th spot is achievable in the long run but I think it would have taken a lot lot longer to get the number 1 spot (6 month+).

I think we have shown we are able to get a site to a good position for a particular keyword on the 1st page without much effort.

If we can spare more time on this challenge in the coming weeks we will but I'm not sure how much we will be able to spare.

Enjoy the rest of your Christmas and all the best for 2011!

Innocent Advertising.

Quick update:

Without any more work being carried out the site has jumped back up to 5th spot.

5th spot is probably where about it going to stay.

I'm assuming your back from your honeymoon? Congratulations by the way

Yup, 5th spot seems to be our resting place. So basically what your saying is, your dumping us for paying clients...

I dunno dumped during xmas