Here at Verti Group International a.k.a. SEO Seattle®, we always stay within the Google guidelines; it is our belief that it’s the way we interpret the guidelines which gives us an edge over other ethical SEO companies.
What that means is although our clients see growth in their rankings for their site, and the number of ranking keywords, the growth is steady. If an SEO company promises, and actually delivers, a hockey stick graph type of ranking increase, then the site may plummet at a similar rate.
The importance of both staying within the guidelines and concentrating on user experience was demonstrated recently when Google, although they didn’t announce, deny or confirm it, launched an algorithm, that due to a tweet from Google’s Gary Illyes is known as Fred. This algorithm, should it exist, caused fluctuations through the rankings. Many websites saw their rankings drop significantly; from what I have learnt, sites that had too many links to affiliate sites, and were overly loaded with advertisements, suffered the most.
The reason for my highlighting how steady growth is sustainable growth, is due to an email I received from a client. He had analyzed his traffic and wrote to thank us, this is what he wrote.” This increase in traffic is obvious and encouraging. The traffic for the last 8 months prior to you getting involved had been pretty steady averaging ~125 visitors per day.”
They have been with us for almost three months to the day. Their traffic has risen steadily in line with their page ranking for various keywords, and they are now getting 300 plus visitors per day. In that time, his keywords ranking in the top 3 have gone from 8 to 68 and from 388 to 626 in keywords ranking from fourth to tenth positions.
We achieved the rise in the rankings, and corresponding visitor numbers, by never straying from our ethos in that we as a company have a responsibility to always stay within the Google guidelines, and never takes risks with our clients’ authority within search.
There were many toxic backlinks that we disavowed and replaced with in-bound links that have a higher authority, ranking influence and are trustworthy. The majority of the new links are branded and have keywords in the anchors. We also began to manage all his social media activity; beginning with a full audit to make sure that none of the recent posts that the client made had a detrimental effect on his authority and ranking. Ongoing work includes considering many of the on-page elements including the URL.
Going forward we will continue to monitor how various important keywords are ranking and react accordingly; often by using quality content that supports the keywords whilst also adding to the user experience.
We hope that you enjoyed this brief look at the way we work and our thoughts regarding how an aversion to risk can produce steady and sustainable growth, resulting in a letter of thanks from a client, three months into his relationship with us.
