Thread: SEO peer review - good or could do better?

I have been learning SEO since about October last year, and at that point our Accountancy website was on about page 10+ of Google results for keywords.

I spent 3 months optimizing the on-page SEO of the site (part-time as this is not my day job), and also added a blog section and social share buttons to the site. New quality blogs every 3 or 4 days. Added Facebook and Google+ sites. Plugged everything into Google/Bing webmasters, and Google Analytics.

Since Christmas I started on back-linking. Mostly directory (targeting about 5 keyword phrases), some commenting on other blogs - no reciprocal or paid links.

Anyway, at Christmas to keep track of the directories submission I also started recording SERPs stats in Excel. These are the results to date across 12 generic keyword phrases (pretty much every possibility to find a local accountant), none including our company name:

27-Dec-11 | Average SERPs 7.62 | Google external links 1006 | best keywords position #2
13-Jan-12 | Average SERPs 7.15 | Google external links 1867 | best keywords position #2
14-Jan-12 | Average SERPs 5.08 | Google external links 1867 | 2 keywords at position #1
17-Jan-12 | Average SERPs 4.23 | Google external links 1867 | 3 keywords at position #1, 3 keywords at position #2 ie. top 6 keywords all in top 2.

So given the jump after the 13th (and ongoing) and the number of Google registered back-links not changing, what do you think has caused this jump, me or Google itself?

The competition is a few hundred other accountants in our city/area with the highest competitor mozRank only 5 (we are currently at 4 but that may be a little out of date). So what do you think, is this good progress or would a big SEO company do a lot better?

I think I would be delighted with the result you have achieved. Given the fact that you have been using mainly directory submission and you are working on it part time, you have achieved significant result. Keep doing what you are doing and you will get the keywords where you want to get them eventually.

A professional SEO company may achieve better result much quicker than you but that will be because the have all the connections that you don't have such as knowing exactly where to get the links, a dedicated link builder etc.

A few things I would suggest you add to your link building repertoire is that yous should diversify your link source, don't rely solely on directories. Get some links from social media sides, direct link from accountancy site or local sites and any other source basically. If you do that, I think in the next 3 months your site should be where you want it to be in SERPS.

Thanks temi

Yeh, I have probably submitted to about 300 free directories across 5 keywords - and those keywords have improved rankings but not hugely more than the non-targetted keywords on back-links. On page optimization seems to have been equally if not more so effective given the jump in the other 7 keyword phrases.

Twitter and WordPress combos I think have been very effective. We have a decent Twitter following and adding new blog content all the time helps advertise the site.

I am not an accountant (my wife is) so in the last week or so I have just been trying to find other accountancy related blogs (ideally with dofollow) for my wife to comment on (as I cannot). I think next I might see if her several hundred local clients would consider a back-link from their site. We have found professionally written customer case-studies (with a journalist interviewing both parties) very good for boosting traffic to both our own and the client's site. This does cost money though, so will only do those every couple of months.