Apr 30
Time for Benchmarks…1st Up - Search Engine Rankings
I started the benchmarking process with our Search Engine rankings in the top 3 because these are my pride and joy (I don’t have any kids yet, so it’s ok for me to say that).
I realize I’m exposing some of our current top-referring & converting phrases to our competitors and of course I had to make sure this was alright with the boss – but it makes sense for me to share everything we experience in case there is another SEO-er out there that has their boss come to them with the same scary domain switch idea. Plus, I’m up for the challenge of giving this information to our competitors and attempting to maintain high rankings regardless.
With that said, here’s where we stood for some of our top referring & converting phrases on April 23rd, 2008 - 1 week before the domain change:
| Phrase | MSN | Yahoo! | |
| akron seo | 2 & 3 | 5 & 6 | 10 |
| akron seo seminar | 1 & 2 | 1 & 2 | 1 & 2 |
| akron web hosting | 8 | 8 & 9 | 3 |
| akron web marketing | 4 | 6 & 7 | 2 & 3 |
| canton ohio web design | 6 & 7 | 19 | 1 |
| canton search marketing | 1 & 2 | 1 & 2 | 4 |
| canton seo | 1 & 2 | 6 & 7 | 1 |
| canton server colocation | 10 | N/A | 13 |
| canton web hosting | 2 & 3 | 15 & 16 | 5 & 6 |
| catholic web design | 10 | 15 | 17 |
| cleveland seo seminar | 4 & 5 | 1 & 2 | 5 & 6 |
| cleveland web hosting | 4 | 26 | 5 |
| columbus seo | 7 | 8 | 19 |
| columbus seo seminar | 1 | 4 & 5 | 1 |
| cruise company seo | 3 | 1 & 2 | 49 |
| healthcare industry seo | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| manufacturer web design | 8 | 1 & 2 | 17 |
| medical office website design | 10 | N/A | N/A |
| ohio search engine optimization | 10 | 3 | 27 |
| ohio seo | 9 | 5 | 10 |
| ohio seo seminar | 3 & 4 | 1 & 2 | 2 |
| rv dealer website design | 4 | 3 | N/A |
| search engine optimization seminar | 1 | 1 | 19 |
| search engine seminar | 5 | 1 & 2 | 7 |
| seo case studies | 8 | 4 | N/A |
| seo rfp | 8 | 1 | 6 |
| seo rfp template | 5 | 4 & 5 | 2 |
| seo seminar | 3 | 2 & 3 | 7 |
| stark county website design | 1 & 2 | N/A | 11 |
| travel industry seo | 5 | 7 | N/A |

May 2nd, 2008 at 3:13 am
[...] TKG SEO Blog wrote an interesting post today on Time for Benchmarksâ
May 6th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
[...] research by our awesome SEO interns, we found that for some of the phrases I mentioned in my Search Engine rankings benchmark post, both the new & old domains are ranking in Yahoo! This gives us more ‘real [...]
May 13th, 2008 at 8:29 am
[...] A handful of phrases are ranking solely because of my previous Search Engine Rankings Benchmark post - these will eventually go away and rankings will settle based on where actual content is [...]