So? Is it Working 1?

October 1st 2018

One week in and I thought it would be a good idea to show you the amazing results of all this work so far. Well… not surprisingly there have been no noticeable changes – these things take time, or so I am told! So this post is really just to set out the starting points and the scores we currently have in order to be able to see if they improve later. Obviously our house being booked out fully for the next five years would be a fairly good sign, but until that happens I am looking at the following:

1. 167 Organic searches over the last 30 days
2. 57 Percentage derived from organic searches over the last 30 days divided by the same period a year previous
3. 16 Position of “large cottages devon” in Google search
4. 31 Position of “stag party houses” in Google search
5. 72 Position of “40th birthday party ideas” in Google search
6. 50 Position of “50th birthday party ideas” in Google search
7. 59 Position of “party house with pool” in Google search
8. 12.2M Alexa rank
9. 1.8 Moz rank
10. 18 Domain Authority
11. 22 Trust Flow
12. 18 Citation Flow
13. 171 External links in Google Search Console
14. 25 Linking sites in Google Search Console

Obviously there are many more metrics and measures available but I’m going to start with these and, to be honest, if I ultimately can’t see any improvement in any of them then I don’t think looking at anything else is going to help much!

Just a note on the search terms I’ve picked: Obviously it would be great to rank number one for “large cottages” rather than the more specific and less frequented “large cottages devon”, but there is so much competition that currently it’s just not worth considering. If we appear at all for “large cottages” it’s on the 9th or 10th page, but if that improves I might reconsider. And if you are wondering why “large cottages devon” gives a good result for us, it is I think primarily because the title of our home page is “Large cottages Devon | bicclescombegrange.com”. So, even if you do nothing else, give your page an appropriate title!

Some of the terms in the list might be unfamiliar to you, as they were to me not too long ago! But I’m not going to explain them all here; they’re easy enough to track down online. Just be warned that there does appear to be some inconsistency in the data provided by various websites (Majestic, Monitor Backlinks, SmallSEOTools, Ahrefs etc), so I wouldn’t consider these metrics and values utterly reliable. The key results for me are obviously Google’s; the rest are just background support to hopefully show over time that I’m on the right track.