This is the keystone post for a series of three other posts that are designed to showcase just how relative SEO in fact is. What do I mean by relative? In this instance, I’m referring to how much competition there is for an actual search term. When I speak with clients, I often tell them that how well they can rank for a search term is relative to how well someone else (competitors) are ranking for that same search term. I figured I’d try to demonstrate this in the wild by creating three very similar posts — targeting SEO at the local level. The locations that will be targeted across the three posts are McCall Idaho, Boise Idaho and Seattle Washington.
What do these places have in common? Hmm. I’ve lived in all of them. Other than that, probably not too much — but I’ll save that for a later post. McCall is a small ski/lake resort town in central Idaho that at the time of the last census had 2000 full-time residences. Boise is the capital of Idaho and weighs in around 202K residences and Seattle — the giant, registers around 600K folks in the city proper. (Note – Seattle has something like 3.2 million people in the metro area — so don’t assume that it’s only three times larger than Boise.)
So there they are, three very different cities represented in three very SIMILAR blog posts. Located below for your reading enjoyment/bewilderment. In case you’re still wondering what the primary test will be, it’s to see how the pages ultimately rank for their respective search terms:
“mccall idaho seo”
“boise idaho seo”
“seattle washington seo”
And with that….let the games begin!
-Scott
P.S. Rest assured that I’ll be reporting back in this post on the results. However, the great thing about this test is that you can play along from home and see for yourself. Enjoy
***Results Update*** (Note that your mileage/results may vary due to the fact that Google has many, many data centers and not all of them are completely synced up.)
February 17th, 2009. 12 hours after initial posting these tests:
“mccall idaho seo” is #1 in google.
“boise idaho seo” is #19 in google.
“seattle washington seo” is something like #48 in google.
February 19th, 2009 3+ days after posting:
It appears that these test pages are no longer in google’s index. Very interesting. It’s theoretically possible that the pages got tweaked by a new robots.txt plugin that I activated, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. My current money is on a bet that these test pages were crawled, indexed, ranked, and subsequently deemed to be spammy for SEO by Google’s algorithm. Regardless, the point of the test was to test and demonstrate how competition impacts SEO. You can see how the size of the market and the amount of competition for a particular search term plays a big part in your rankings.
Focus on the fundamentals. Build a site that is useful to people, with content that is well laid out and easy to navigate — and keep at it — and you’ll be rewarded. Research your competition, look at what they are doing well and what you can do better. Make changes and improvements to your site and measure the results. Repeat.
I’ve been in McCall a few months now and have been giving a fair amount of thought to the local paper, The Star-News. (And not just “Why is it called that, anyway?”)
