20 Days Of None Stop Blogging
Posted on May 21, 2014 by Mike Nuttall
The second of the reports on my search engine ranking
I've decided to change the search terms I'm testing, out goes "Mike Nuttall Leeds" because that's not really important to me. I want to be discovered by people who need a website that I don't know, not people who already know my name, if they already know my name there's a good chance that they already know how to get in touch with me.
So I'll just concentrate on the first two terms that might get me work and MODX Leeds as I think MODX is a great CMS and it would be great if a community grew up around it in Leeds, and I'm findable in relation to it.
| Search terms | Day 1 | Day 10 | Day 20 |
| web design Leeds | 9 on page 7 | 10 on page 6 | 5 on page 8 |
| website design Leeds | 4 on page 6 | 6 on page 5 | 9 on page 6 |
| MODX Leeds | 7 on page 1 | 9 on page 1 | 10 on page 1 |
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Average number of visitors per day to the website as a whole*: (for the last 10 days (except Day 1)) |
7 (previous year) | 9.6 | 15.3 |
* Worked out using Google analytics: set custom dates for the previous 10 days (not including today) the under Audience => Overview there is the total number of users, so I just divide this by 10.
So anyway HUGELY disappointing results. My ranking is getting worse! I can't believe it! All this effort for nothing. I need to look into this further.
The only positive is the number of visitors. This could be due to a number of factors. It could be me as I view my site from multiple different browsers on different computers, I don't know how Google define an individual user. And I've been logging in a lot more because I've been doing this blog. The other factor is that I have been tweeting regularly about the blog so that may have generated some traffic.
- Have a look in Googl'e Webmaster Tools to see if there are any clues there.
- I suspect it might be the speed of the site as I have been having a few issues with the speed and even outages recently (luckily I don't have any clients on this server), I need to look into this in more detail.
- I need to revisit Google's best practice guidelines and do an audit of my site.
Just out of interest these were the total amount of results returned for the search terms:
| Search term: | Total number of results returned |
| web design Leeds | 17,200,000 |
| website design Leeds | 24,300,000 |
| MODX Leeds | 808,000 |
A web developer in Leeds time schedule
What has stopped me getting sunburn today?:
| 6 hours 51 minutes | Finishing touches to a project |
| 1 hour 4 minutes | Writing journal and graphics work |
| 33 minutes | Email and clearing my in box |
Total: 10 hours 45 minutes
Getting that nice feeling when a web project is coming to it's final stages, and excited about my next one...
Exercise: 40 minutes gardening followed by a 10k run... tiring!
Tomorrow: Tying up loose ends of the current project and I hope to get a chance to look into the poor performance of my own website.
