MY Local Services - SEO Challenge

Thanks a lot Tom, it's a brave (but confident) man that does a public challenge 

Looking forward to seeing how SEO is done properly in this new Google Panda and Penguin world, and I'm sure plenty of people will be keeping a close eye as well.

Great way to showcase your skills, happy to be a case study and hopefully good news for the forum

Best of British, let the challenge commence 

Cleaned down all the posts relating to our SEO Pakistani friend. Old school SEO at it's worse 

Hopefully Tom is going to show us home grown professional SEO 

Looking forward to an update 

Sure, just getting set up still, seen a bit of dancing in the serps. 

First proper update should be in about a week. Ranking update in about 3. 

Originally Posted by Steve Richardson

“Cleaned down all the posts relating to our SEO Pakistani friend. Old school SEO at it's worse 

Hopefully Tom is going to show us home grown professional SEO 

Looking forward to an update ”

Update:

So day 1 and I noticed MLS doesn't struggle for content, although its not a huge forum its probably my favourite as there are no Bull sh*tters. Like on other huge business forums in the UK….

This meant that changing up the design of the site, internal linking structure, techy SEO points was not really an option, so as always we are left with the links.

After speaking to Simon we decided to go with the promotion of: “seo business forum” and “business forum”.

The problem (in short) – Lack of links:

18 referring domains to the /forum page

Only 1 to the seo sub forum, although its all about quantity and authority nowadays, one link simply isn’t going to cut it.

Luckily lack of links is my favourite type of problem to address (technical stuff is tedious) and not really applicable for this type of job. 

SIDENOTE: Weirdly the homepage of the MLS site was ranking higher than the SEO Sub forum, which was super odd.

Long story short: Build links to the homepage of the site, homepage of the forum AND the seo sub forum page.

What I'm doing:

Built a buffer site that I could build some links to fast without being hit, the main one of these was: http://forumseo.weebly.com/ This site is where I would be building links too. This was for a number of reasons, but the most important being, I could hit this site with a high % of relevant anchor text without being penalised by Google; “seo forum” “UK business forum” “UK SEO forum” etc and the other is because I had a link to ghost marketing on their (as this was a free case study I thought I’d get a bit of link juice for myself.)

This caused a bit of early movement with the site, but wanting to speed this up. I created an automated a link building process (OMG not automation…) to the weebly site and the social media sites, although these processes are a hell of a lot slower to improve rankings, it would make the future promotions look more natural. 

Next on the list was the high quality kicker links, these you can either buy usually from authors writing for big blog style sites (for example Huffington post post’s cost around $500) or you can build them from your own website if you have a blog network. I did a bit of both and spread the link building to the weebly site, the homepage and the SEO section of the forum for more diversity. With the anchor text “seo business forum” and “UK business forum”

The links should start to get indexed over the next few days. I will post a rankings update in 1-2 weeks.

Cheers

Tom.

Update time 

And its a beaut. 

Hopefully the rankings have stopped bouncing around in the SERPs, it looks like they, have so these are the results from my 3 week case study. 

Started on the 19th November, rankings were:

“seo business forum” - 16th 

“UK business forum” - 47th 

Now: 

"seo business forum" is 6th and

"UK business forum" is 38th

Google likes to trick us with dips before coming back up to where you should be. 

Rankings graphs below:

And

Tell your friends. 

Thanks

Tom.

Steve- Didn't know how to contact you personally, but would it be possible to get a quick paragraph testimonial from you. I'm just looking to build up some testimonials for my site. 

Thanks

Tom.

Just emailed you Tom.

So is that the challenge finished, or is still ongoing?

Cheers Steve, that's come through. I think this will be taking a back seat for the next few weeks, as to drastically improve rankings further would take a lot more time on my part, which I don't have before the new year. 

Hope that's alright.

Cheers

Hi Tom,

I just make a check and My Local Services is now 27 for "seo business forum" - the site rankings are worse than ever for that keyword. Also i noticed that instead of the forum, Google ranks My Local Services homepage. What do you think is the reason?