My SEO results after 4 years.

Congratulations for your amazing results..!
All the best for your future..!

 

I think your comments nail it exactly, the site has to have quality - when someone hits the site they need to find what they are after or they leave (bounce rate).

Quite a few people have contacted me via PM asking for more info. I wish I had the silver bullet to share with you all, but I don't. In the last two years I think I might have added a single page to the website - so the site is basically static. I already rank where I want to, so why mess with it.

Regarding link campaigns, I have done none. I added links to the site from some other sites I run (just 2 or 3 sites), and I used google adwords to promote the site in the beginning (all traffic above is non paid, you can see it accounts for 89.57% of all traffic to the site) over the years the site has built up links from about 60 different sources (according to yahoo). I did not ask/trade/pay for any of the links, a few times the links to the site have been from major websites like about.com (I think that is major anyway), when they make reference to something on the site.

The longer a link remains to your site, the more power it has. If about.com links to you, that is great. But if they leave the link up for 3 years it is a lot better! So with the aging of the links and the slow growth of new links, I seem to rank for more long tail searches.

One thing I find interesting about sites is the bounce rate. If you look at the stats above regarding the bounce rate for the search engine traffic, it is only a 15% - 20% bounce rate. I believe that Google keeps track of the bounce rates, sites with low bounce rates must be giving users what they are looking for so they rank the site higher.

How does Google know if someone bounces?

If someone does a search for 'water coolers' and clicks on the #1 link, but it does not give them what they are after... guess what they do? They go right back to Google and search again. Google keeps track of this, they know that the site the user clicked on did not give them what they wanted because they came back to Google for another search right away. The result is, Google should drop the rank of the site if it happens a lot. You can also see people look at an average of 6 pages per visit, so the site keeps them on the page for quite a while. I would imagine this type of thing matters in the long run.

The site I have posted the stats here ranks well, converts well and has a low bounce rate.

Unfortunately my 'system' does not seem to always work. Since this site performed so well over the years, I started two more sites with similar themes but with MUCH MUCH more competition for ranking. The site above has very little (basically nothing) competition for ranking. The new sites I started some time later used the exact same website template and layout style. The bounce rate sucks for both of them, and I have not been able to obtain any significant rankings or traffic on either of them.

In fact, let me go pull up the stats for one of those sites. It is generating some traffic... I'll be back in a while with the same type of stats to share.

 

Wow, just amazing..... What is your site by the way? Link?

 

Whoa man! Great results and congratulations!

Since you do not make any changes to your site, could you outline your seo strategy? I mean what would you attribute your success to? Back Links? Nothing? etc.

 

I would have to contribute the success of the site to age of site, lack of SEO competition in the niche, age of links and perhaps most important the bounce rate of the visitors. I am going to post stats for two other sites in a couple of minutes. The sites are no where near as successful, and I believe in large part that is due to the bounce rates.

If anyone else has a theory on bounce rates please speak up.

 

Here are the results of two sites that I started after the success of the first one. Neither site is going gang busters with SEO traffic. Site #2 targets a Canadian market, which is small - only 30 million people. I have used Google adwords to promote the site and the site has generated a profit but only a very small one.

Site #2 Stats




Site #3 targets the US market, much larger at 300 million people. I have done no promotion at all, not a single advertisement. I do direct traffic to that site when an American visitor visits the Canadian site, so there may be some small amount of traffic that way. The bulk of the visitors are from search engines (82.1%). A total of 1,140 visitors since Feb 2009. Not much, and unfortunately not a single customer generated from the traffic to the USA site. The USA site does look much more impressive with the growth rate of the traffic, but the traffic does not convert.

Site #3 Stats




Both sites suffer terribly with the bounce rates upwards of 60% - 65%. Bottom line, I am not giving the visitors what they are after on these two sites. If I accomplished a bounce rate of only 20% on sites 2 & 3, I strongly suspect the profits would be much better and so would the search engine results. Google would reward the site ranking by moving it up, Google is looking to ensure their users are happy with the results they are returning. If a visitor to your site does not stay longer than to one of the other results Google is returning, then why should they continue to rank you higher than them?

Glad I have shared these stats with everyone, making myself think out loud and looking at the numbers like this I can see that I need to change the layout / content on sites #2 & #3 to give the user what they are after. With bounce rates this high, I am simply not doing a good job on these sites.

Anyone else want to share bounce rate numbers for their sites for search engine traffic?

 

Congratulations!

 

I think the site keeps growing even with it staying static because of the "big dog" theory..

Meaning if your site is good and ranks #1, you will get way more visitors, more natural links your way faster than anyone else on the first page.. Kind of like the rich get richer because they already have money to invest, while the poorer get poorer..

 

this just goes to show you what a little honest hard work can do for you.

 

Congrats that's good case of seo study.

 

Well, it should help more people realize that SEO is long-term, not short.

 

I think reading this it makes me think that people just try too hard trying to optimize there website, changing things here and changing things there changing the title tags every few days and adding a few more keywords to the description, spending days and days backlinking. All this stops us writing about the honest content that people want to read and in the time without having to keep making drastic changes to your site the rankings will come. This is a great read and shows you don't have to be a professional to make this work.

 

God,4years.

 

Awesome! After 4 years of painful seo journey, all your efforts have been rewarded. Thanks for sharing.

 

awesome man good job!!

 

It shows the hard work done behind the SEO activities you had carried out for the website.
It would be helpful if you can share your techniques with us over here.

 

But 4 yrs a very very long time mate... You could have done that in first 6-7 months easily.

 

6-7 months "easily"?!?

Wow, give us the secret!

This is amazing and motivating, seeing this guy's traffic going through the roof is inspiring.

 

fresh content alone wont do the trick. Proper site structure/linking etc are KEY to indexing all new content...

 

Hello Friend,

Wow really , good , congratulation.