The Value of Top Rankings < The Organic SEO

The Value of Top Rankings

11 Dec 2007 at 09:07 by Joshua J. Steimle

For those of you who may be new to SEO and don't know if you really believe that search engines can impact your business's bottom line, here's some interesting data from my own SEO company, based in Utah. You see, over the past years I've gotten quite a bit of business from search engines, especially when people were searching for terms like "utah seo," "utah search engine optimization," or "utah web design."

Recently, I reworked the structure of the mwi.com website, and so Google has had to figure out where all the new content is. As a further experiment I did not use 301 redirects, just to see how long it would take Google on its own to figure things out.

The result was that the mwi.com site dropped in the rankings. This was to be expected. And I expected I would see a drop in traffic and therefore leads, and I sure did. Here's how traffic has change during the past month, comparing the first 11 days of December to the first 11 days of November.

"utah web design" - 15 vs. 6, a drop of -60%

Considering our ranking and traffic from other terms have dropped as well, it's no wonder the number of leads I'm receiving, that is, people who filled out our online request for proposal form, has also gone way down.

Am I worried? Not really, I know it's a temporary bump and like I said, I was expecting this. But what's to be learned from this is that:

1. Ranking matter. Even moving down from #1 to just #4 or #5 can make a big difference.

2. 301 redirects do make a difference. Use them. It has taken Google a long time to figure things out, but once I've used 301 redirects they figure it out in a hurry.

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Comments

I recently used 301 redirects from an old domain to a totally new domain. As far as I can tell, everything was back to normal within a month or so. I even got my Pagerank back at my new domain, for whatever that matters. 301's do help.

Posted by: Stephan Miller at December 11, 2007 12:31 PM

I'm surprised there wasn't more of a drop on 15 vs 6.

Posted by: Jordan Kasteler at December 11, 2007 04:26 PM

Well, it turns out our rankings for "utah web design" bounced back pretty quickly, but I didn't notice that until I had already written the post and then I figured I didn't want to scrap the whole thing so there it is.

Posted by: Joshua Steimle at December 11, 2007 05:21 PM

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