Does SEO improve Rank Position? Here’s the proof

We launched How To Do Digital Marketing in February 2017 with an idea of providing high quality content for those looking to learn and implement digital marketing tactics and techniques. Our focus audience was largely the small business community, working professionals and aspiring digital marketers who had one commonality between them – a desire to learn digital marketing.

Like most businesses, we didn’t have a load of money to blow up on Search Engine Marketing or Facebook Marketing. We decided to focus our complete efforts on building ourselves up through Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Right from the start we knew we were in a highly competitive category when it came to SEO. There were plenty of digital marketing experts like Neil Patel or firms like econsultancy, social media examiner, shout me loud, Hubspot, Social Sprout and thousands of digital marketing bloggers, experts, speakers and professionals out there who were currently enjoying the fruits of their SEO labor.

But we knew one thing- the interest levels in digital marketing were on an upswing as was clear from the Google Trends. The line represents the interest in the search term digital marketing globally.  The trend line is clearly upwards.

Good SEO works on good quality content and ensuring that you stick to the fundamentals. In our earlier blog on what is SEO and how to do it we explained the process. For our website we focused on equally on doing great On-page SEO and equally on ensuring that our off-page seo strategy was designed to help us improve our rank position.

SEO is a slow burner, which means that you need to have plenty of patience, put in a whole lot of hard work and focus on the few main things that you have resources to do in order to improve your position.

4 months and about 70 pieces of quality content that we created around digital marketing, we decided to analyze our data. One of the more useful tools to track the effectiveness of your SEO efforts is the Google Search Console, which we used.

Here is the proof that SEO really works.

Appearance in Search Results

The above graph show how our fledgling platform started appearing in search results over the past 90 days.  The red line shows the trend line for the same. As one can see, the number of times our new platform started appearing on search results was going up consistently over the past 90 days.

Increase in rank position

Over the past 90 days, our rank position across all queries, across the world on an average kept improving consistently indicating that what we doing in terms of our SEO strategy was in the right direction. So from a high average rank position of 75 (which translates to about page 8 on Google Search!) we have today moved up 3 pages to page 5. Still a long way to go!! But getting there.

Increase in number of clicks

Consistent with our improvement in rank position was the improvement in the website traffic as a result.

Country wise

The top 3 countries were we came up in the search results were India, US and Romania

We next took it a level down to check out how we performed in our rank position for India.

The work that we were doing in SEO was consistently helping us come up in search results across all queries and pages. The trend line showed an upward trend indicating that our seo efforts were in the right direction

Commensurate with that was the fact that our overall rank position in India was also improving over the 90 day period. Over this period, we had managed to move up the rank position from page 5 of Google Search to about hovering around page 3-4 .

Lastly we looked at our top 3 pages by search volume to determine whether our off-page SEO had worked enough to improve the respective page positions on Google Search or not. The first page we looked at was our content on that explained to readers about Broad Match, Exact Match and Phrase Matches which we had put up on our site as a Blog on 21^st May, 2017.

The graph clearly showed an upward trend except for a brief period when the results dropped drastically. We went back to the article, made the necessary corrections and re-indexed the page again and the graph went back straight up! Bear in mind that this blog on google keywords match types was just 52 days old

Lastly we look at one of our top search queries- Google AdWord Keyword Types to see how we had fared against this specific keyword

As can seen from the trend line above plotted over the past 90 days , our rank position for that specific keyword  has been improving while the number of times we came up in search results is on an upward trend. This indicated to us that for this specific keyword we were slowly improving on an overall level

Conclusion

SEO is one of the most fascinating and toughest digital marketing activities. It calls for careful planning with regard to keyword research, content planning. It also requires one to build high quality content that would be off value to the readers being targeted and lastly it requires grunt work in terms of doing off-page SEO. All this coupled with a lot of data analytics to understand what is working for you and what is working against you.

But the proof is out there in front of us that SEO really works. We are seeing it happen every day on our platform.

Read up on our other blogs on Search Engine Optimization or watch our video tutorials on SEO to get a better grip on how to implement SEO for your website.