SEO Keyword Experimental Results

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:40:30 +0000

In a recent post I gave details on an SEO experiment to see how the rankings change with time. Well, the results are in and are presented below:

Graph 1. Cheap Flights

Graph 2. Christmas Gifts

Graph 3. Dog Kennels

Graph 4. Black Circles

Graph 5. Politics

Graph 6. PHP

The graphs show the rankings of websites competing for the top-ten positions for a particular key-phrases over a fourteen day time period. Looking at the number-one position, we can see that in general they are flat over the entire time period.

One thing that is clear from the data is that the URL appears to play an important part in the selection of the top sites. In five out of six of the keyphrases, the top positions were held by sites which include the key phrase in the domain name. Interestingly, in the one case where the key-phrase was not included in the domain holding the top position, there was a variation in position, not that this is statistically significant, yet.

In order to extract useful information, we chose search terms that we thought would show degrees of competition and topicality. To some extent this is shown in the data. The most volatile changes occur in the data for cheap flights. However, topical, competitive terms such as Christmas gifts show do not show the degree of competition that we expected. Perhaps this is because Christmas gifts is still a rather generic term despite being topical.

Politics shows an almost static results with time. We chose this keyword because we thought that it would not be a term that would be sought after term for online businesses. Similarly for black circles, but it turns out that this is strongly connected with tyres and does show a fair degree of competition.

PHP was also chosen as a non-competitive word on the basis that it freely available open source software. Looking at this data we can see that the rankings for several sites, move in unison. Could this be a sign of non-competitive term? Rankings that move together, could still be uncompetitive if occasionally, sites pop-into the index and displace a number of search results.

It has not escaped us that looking at the graphs, it may be possible to define a better metric of competition from collected data. Ranking data is easy to collect and in some sense is directly linked to how competitive a key phrase is. Others methods of measuring competition rely on gut feeling or the weighted average of measurements returned by various indirect search queries and on-site factors.

We have more data for the other six key phrases to be analysed and this will be presented it in a future post.

Key Phrase Ranking Experiment

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:31:59 +0000

One of the aspects of SEO that is most interesting is seeing how rankings change with time. Naturally, if you specialise in SEO, it is good to see that your rankings are improving with the changes that you make, however theoretically, there are three reasons why rankings would change. These are:

You make changes on your site which make it more or less favourable with the current structure of the search engine algorithm.
Your competitors make changes on their site which alters the results forcing a change in the rankings
Algorithmic change in the search engine which re-ranks all sites according to different parameters

Any combination of the above is also a valid reason for changes in the rankings. However, in our experiment we chose to follow the rankings for twelve keywords over a period of fourteen days to see how the results changed with time.

The key phrases were chosen to reflect a diversity of what we believed to a cross-section of very competitive, competitive and less competitive phrases. Single and double key phrases were also selected. The key phrases chosen were:

Cheap Flights – very competitive
Christmas Gifts – very competitive and seasonal
Dog Kennels – competitive
Black Circles – random sounding but competitive for tyres
Politics – not really competitive in business
PHP – not competitive in business terms
SEO -very competitive
Car Rental – very competitive
Restaurant – competitive
Toothpaste – competitive
Stone Mason – less competitive, two words
Dodecahedron – less competitive, one word

The difficulty is in choosing key phrases that will reflect the level of competition, inevitably there will be businesses that are targeting almost every key phrase.

To minimise the noise from the results, the same data centre, IP=66.249.91.103 was used. Results were also collected at the same time each day. To avoid any client side influence of any Google accounts or cookies, a clean installation of Opera 9.62 was used to take the results. The first page of results for each key phrase being saved to disc as an .mht file for later analysis.

Our broad expectation was that the results would show that for less competitive terms there would be less activity and for the most competitive, seasonal key phrases, the activity would be more frantic as competing companies jostle for the top positions. The results are being processed and will be reported in a later post.

Just Search Labs » Ranking

SEO Keyword Experimental Results

Key Phrase Ranking Experiment