SEO: what part art and what part science?

[wrconard]

Hi All:

Just writing in the hopes of a reality check. When I compare the first page or two of companies in any field it's usually clear why the top two are on top and why the bottom two are on the bottom, but for everything in between, it often looks pretty gray to me. It's very difficult to find a smoking gun as to why companies rank where they do. While looking at one you could say it ranks because of Yelp reviews and another because of links, but then there are other completely contradictory examples. So I guess I'm asking, is this just the nature of the business? Is a lot of this simply unknowable and you look at what you can do that is most expeditious and will have the most impact, as well as more expensive longer term steps, decide what is practical, move forward and see what happens?

Grateful for anyone's thoughts so I can better understand just how lost i should feel.

Cheers, Wes.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Hi Wes,

It's okay to be lost. I've been on this forum for about 6 months, and I still feel insanely lost...but our rankings have improved. I'm not particularly good at understanding why one page ranks higher than another in the cases you've described, but I can tell you how our rankings improved. Most of it is very "knowable" and while, it may not be the best strategy, it has worked for us.

Not knowing much of anything when I started, I started with on-page optimization. I just filled out the Moz's Page Grader with the keyword and the URL. Then, I followed the steps till everyone was an A. Ironically, when I started, we did have some pages with "C's and F's" that still ranked well, and pages with "A's" that didn't, but that wasn't the norm. All of our rankings have improved from the on-page optimization.

Another easy-fix for us was improving our pagespeed and loading times. I just used pagespeed insights, and followed their instructions on what Google wanted me to do to improve my score. Though, some of that got pretty technical, so I did have to outsource some of it. However, there's a lot of competition for that type of service, so it's not very expensive.

Blogging: I try to write at least one article a week that is useful and/or topical. Like "Why your primary care doctor won't treat you after a car accident" or "Jameis Winston's Current Legal Situation" and I make sure there are not any grammatical errors. Also, I make sure I'm allowed to use whatever pictures I use. I do not know how to make something go viral, but I do know if you consistently write unique, quality articles, google will like it.

Duplicate Content: We had a ton of duplicate content, because most of our pages were almost exactly the same. Just the area of practice or location was changed. That was very time consuming to fix, but it was not difficult to understand or change.

I'm just now trying to get us ranking well in the Local category. Not sure if that applies to you or not, but it will help our company out a lot. What am I doing since I don't know much about Local? I put my citation in the Moz's listing checker and I do what it tells me to do to improve my score...(noticing a theme here?)

More generally, assuming you use this forum to ask a lot of questions, read through the responses, research terms that you don't understand and keep up with the blogs, you'll be surprised how quickly you'll learn.

Best of luck! Happy Friday!

Ruben

[wrconard]

Hi Ruben:

Thanks very much for writing. That's pretty much what I'm doing as well. Hats off to Moz for keeping things simple and making it accessible to folks who aren't as computer literate as a they might like to be. Step by step works. I am doing local and the Moz Local is definitely where are start. Thanks again for the note.

Cheers,

Wes

[Kingof5]

There are multiple ways to do everything in SEO. Multiple ways to rank highly, multiple ways to lose all rankings. I'd say it's pretty much 0% science, because if any part of it was then it wouldn't be nearly as hard. Even the things that one might say we have down to a science (proper title tag structure, well written meta description, etc.) aren't really because Google can display them how they want to display them - not how you wrote them.

The most important thing I can stress is don't rely solely on SEO. Don't rely solely on any one strategy. That's a guaranteed way to fail. Use SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc. Diversify your strategy and you won't freak when Google changes the algorithm and everything goes upside down.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Wes,

Do you have a mobile site? Or a responsive design site? Or neither? We are in the works of creating a responsive design site, because that's what google says to do. However, for now, we just have the desktop and mobile ones. if you don't have either, I would recommend dudamobile. It is super easy to build and very cheap. (I mean cut and paste easy. No tech skills required).

• Ruben

[wrconard]

We have a very basic mobile site as we have not put our full attention to that yet. It's not responsive, it's just basic. I think it will work for now, but I want something better as the brand definitely suffers. I'll check out dudamobile. I need simple. Thanks very much for the tip.

-Wes

[wrconard]

Good advice, thank you. Luckily I know some of those other things better than SEO, so that works out well.

Cheers,

Wes