First, a really important concept…

COSTS exist before INCOME

Everybody starts life with basic costs (food, housing and clothing). The fundamental reason why you earn money is to cover these costs. They will not simply disappear if you stop earning money.

Of course, once you cover these costs, you’re free to create yet more costs in your life such as a car, a social life, better food etc. as Maslow’s trusted Hierarchy of Needs dictates.

The same is of course true for small businesses: Revenue does not start from day one, but costs often do.

So it makes a lot of sense to learn to control your costs, both personally and in business.

Why Focus on Controlling Costs

It’s much easier and faster to reduce your outgoings today, rather than increase your income.

For a small business, it’s just as important to improve your profit margins by sourcing cheaper packaging, postage, insurance, outsourcing, phone bills etc. then it is to increase your product sell price.

Here’s some examples that immediately come to mind as a I write this post:

Individuals:

• Quit your £30/month gym membership
• Switch to a bank with 0% overdraft
• Downgrade your phone plan
• Buy bulk food (rice, bottled water, meat to freeze)
• Avoid buying lunches in the city

Small Businesses:

• Print on both sides
• Use Skype instead of the landline where possible
• Chase invoices earlier

I could write hundreds of small tips to cut costs, but that’s for another article I think. It’s more important for you at this stage to understand that reducing costs is essentially the same as immediately earning more money.

Stop Haemorrhaging Money

I own an iphone – a wonderful work of art and engineering that never ceases to frustrate me – However, I am legally obliged to pay £30 a month as a priority before I buy food or pay my rent.

How wack is that?!… I am legally bound by contract to pay for a mobile phone BEFORE I feed my family.

Add to this car insurance, music, TV, landline etc. and very quickly it becomes apparent I have hundreds of pounds of costs before I have even bought my food or paid my rent!

Everyone – indivuals, families and businesses – needs to be very careful before they commit to regular payments, especially when unable to cancel at short notice.

When Your Costs Control You

This post was inspired by a movie I just watched, The Joneses, in which a man, Larry, kills himself because his monthly credit repayments are too much, leaving him unable to pay his mortgage or support his wife – oh yeah, spoiler alert!

Larry had a serious problem that he alone was responsible for – he allowed his outgoings to exceed his income.

He was undisciplined and shortsighted – just like most of us.

In 1850 Charles Dickens also gave us a lesson in how this way of life ultimately results in misery. He introduced us to a character called Wilkins Micawber, whose famous quote is enshrined in economics and popular culture as Micawber’s Law:

Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six,
result happiness.

Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six,
result misery.

Of course in less eloquent language, this means those who spend more than they earn are on course for disaster – you can literally plot their descent into misery on a graph!

For those international visitors who are not familar with old British currency, you can think of it as:

$10.01 income
$10.00 expense
= happiness

$10.00 income
$10.01 expense
= misery

Micawber’s law will ALWAYS be relevant to both individuals and businesses. I know it’s super basic and a little patronising, but so many people fail to apply it to their lives or businesses.

Thanks for the Lesson, Dad…

You’re welcome. And tell your mother I said hi.

Joking aside, this may be the single most important post you’ll ever ready if you honestly apply this concept to the way you view finance.

Making more money doesn’t get simpler than spending less.

I posted just the one article in April; a collection of tactics I’ve been using to cut down the signal-to-noise ratio and ween myself off the digital information addiction that affects so many online professionals. Thanks for all the great feedback.

I’ve since learned that I’m way behind the curve on this trend of working more efficiently via simplicity. It’s a movement known as minimalism and it seems I’m only beginning a journey that already has inspired hundreds of quality posts written by minimalist advocates such as Leo, Oscar and many more.

Minimalism – it’s good to find a name for it.

Anyway, on to last month’s report…

I don’t promote via Twitter or social bookmarking sites, so this website relies on old-school Web 2.0 methods to drive traffic: RSS (subscribe here!), blog comments, guest posts and organic search.

As a result, the growth will be slower than many comparable blogs. I’m cool with this however. No pressure, no expectations.

Traffic Overview

20% up on visits, 58% up on page views. This is driven by some comments I left on a few blogs, although Direct visitors have increased just over 23% too. However, at these low figures, it’s unwise to draw any conclusions.

Subscribers

Top Referring Sites

Top Referring Keywords

Activity

SAScon 2010

The digital marketing conference I’ve been organising, with some other very talented gents, went ahead and was simply fantastic. We had panels on blackhat vs. whitehat SEO, social media, pan-European adwords campaigns, and more.

I enjoyed some great chats with Yoast, Lyndon, Judith and Bas at the pre-event party.

Project Z

After last month’s exhausting bug-hunt on Project Z, I spent April working on a long-term, whitehat SEO strategy based on developing a brand.

What does this mean in non-geek terms? It means that given the choice between competing on price or inbound links, I’d rather spend my time nurturing a brand into something people trust and remember.

More minimalisation

I’m still unravelling my mind from the past year’s worth of digital overload. This month I tried leaving my iPhone at home when I went out with my wife; every so often I would reach for it and momentarily panic when I couldn’t find it – how very silly!

We fed the ducks at the river and picked dandelions for this year’s St. George’s wine. I suddenly remembered what’s important in life.

SEO

Finally, I’ve also been developing an pioneering SEO forecasting system with keyword-level accountability for all KPIs such as visibility, visits, sales, revenue etc.

It incorporates seasonality, click-through data, adwords search volumes, and if available also PPC and analytics data.

The next update will hopefully provide traditional PPC metrics (CPC, CPA etc.) as well as showing SEO and PPC as an integrated channel.

It should make it possible for clients and agencies to quickly and visually compare SEO performance with the forecast (I’m aware I’m probably constructing my own gallows!)

Lessons I learned this month:

Dandelions taste like asparagus

Minimalism really does work. You don’t need to go to extremes, but don’t allow everything you consume to ultimately consume you. Take a break and go feed the ducks!

Recently I spent some important time redefining my priorities: both online and in the real world. Much of this has involved identifying elements that drain my time and focus with little return – the old 80:20 rule.

I’m feeling really positive about this, and I hope I can pass some of that on to you, even if you just apply one tip from below to your work life.

I warn you, it’s a long post. Here’s what I’ve done over the last month…

I LET SOME PROJECTS GO

I let a handful of good domains expire that I’d bought with the best intentions to monetise. I didn’t even sell them!

I no longer have any regular freelance clients on my books – I’m not averse to taking any on, but I have a clearer idea of what is (and isn’t) mutually benficial to both parties.

There was one project that was very difficult to let go: a joint venture with a friend that was starting to make money and had the potential to scale nicely. In the end we decided the full revenue would benefit him far more and I stepped out.

The end result has been a massive weight lifted from my shoulders, and a resolution not to spread myself too thinly again.

I DELETED MY TWITTER ACCOUNT!

Twitter is a double-edged sword: on one hand it’s a direct connection to so many people, and so much information, and on the other hand it’s a direct connection to so many people, and so much information.

You see what I did there ;) Twitter is also as addictive as crack-flavoured Ferrero Rocher.

One morning recently, I woke up with a burning conviction to reclaim some of my productivity and decided to go cold turkey: I completely, and irreversably, deleted my Twitter account.

In short, I realised that the time and effort Twitter required of me was not proportionate to what it gave back.

Now, I realise some people have built a great deal of their industry reputation through consistent Twitter activity, but honestly ask yourself if you’re on Twitter every couple of minutes then what else are you actually doing?

I REASSESSED MY USE OF EMAIL

Remember that childhood excitment on recieving a letter? I’ll bet adult life has replaced that with the knowledge that 99% of letters you recieve are bills or junk mail.

Email has become a very similar medium – 99% of my inbox consisted of newsletters from the myriad of web services I’ve signed up to over the years, or one-sided requests for marketing help.

My ideal inbox is one that contains only these:

• Communications from project teams I’m actively working on
• Purchase Reciepts
• Alerts (e.g. if my server falls over, or if traffic drops below a threshold)
• The odd personal email from friends and family
• Emails from affiliate networks telling me they are increasing my commissions and sending me another Maserati

I UNSUBSCRIBED FROM EMAIL LISTS

In the space of 2 days I have unsubscribed from Amazon, Maplin, Ebay, Confused, Play, Linkedin, Sprouter, Unique Blog Designs, Market Samurai, Liverpool Airport Parking ffs and more, simply because their emails offered absolutely no value to me.

Those that didn’t allow me to unsubscribe easily have been marked as spam (Play and Confused for example) for Gmail to deal with in the background.

EMAIL NOW WORKS FOR ME (not the other way around!)

I now use my unread items as a general to-reply list – type in:unread into Gmail – and when I’ve actioned an email I mark it as read. I now try to respond to emails immediately when possible… my replies are usually one of three things:

• Confirmation that I have done something
• A polite reply that I’m unable/unwilling to do something
  (although I usually offer friendly advice – i.e. pay me, speak to this guy, use a certain tool)
• A quick reply to say I’ve recieved their email, and will get around to actioning it within timeframe X

I avoid this final type of email wherever possible, simply because:

• I hate holding back a project because a bottleneck step rests with me
• I would like other people to complete their bottleneck steps as soon as possible, and I aim to be an example
• My peace of mind is directly linked to the length of my to-do list

I CLEANED MY DESKTOP

I used to use my Windows desktop as a workspace to save documents to, with the best intentions to move them to their rightful folders at some later, unspecified date. As you can imagine this never happened!

Now, I use my desktop as a zen-like starting place that focuses me on the task at hand. It only contains shortcuts for the functions I heavily use:

• Advanced Web Ranking
• My Desktop
• My Network Places
• Recycle Bin

…along with Calvin Coolidge’s wise words on persistence:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. “

My browsers (FF, IE8,7,6 and Chrome) are in my Quick Launch bar along with SciTE, the only text-editor you will ever need (except perhaps Darkroom).

This tip has to go hand-in-hand with a new resolution to file your documents with discipline and logic so you can find them again. I use a 1.5TB external hard drive for all my documents – whilst my installed programs which live on my internal hard drive – this allows me to move to another computer and take my familar folder structure with me.

I REGAINED CONTROL OF INSTANT MESSAGING

I used to get bombarded with frequent requests to Digg this or Stumble that. This, along with my friends being only a click away to chat, simply had to go.

Skype and Digsby (probably Adium or Pidgin for you Ubuntu or Mac-boys) are now tools I boot up only when I’ve pre-arranged to chat with someone; they don’t stay open in the system tray, pinging me relentlessly.

I ORGANISED MY START MENU

My Start Menu looks like this now – it’s logical, short and a pleasure to use. My Start Menu has now almost totally replaced my desktop icons.

I UNINSTALLED MY VIDEO GAMES

I’ve always been a PC gamer as opposed to consoles, but this has meant having my games installed on the computer that I work from… Peggle was the first to go! I also uninstalled Steam, which is just too much of a temptation to re-install old games.

The only game I’ve kept is the Witcher; and only because I’m close to finishing it!

I IMPROVED MY PASSWORD MANAGEMENT

Anyone who aims to make money online will have built up a daunting collection of login details for the websites they use. You can’t be an SEO, affiliate, adsenser, dropshipper or article marketer without juggling accounts and passwords. This creates two problems:

1. Security

If you’re simply remembering your passwords, then chances are you have between 4 and 8 combinations that you use consistently; you know this is an accident waiting to happen but you risk it every time you sign up to a new service with the same details.

2. Recollection

Or lack of it. Being productive is all about getting into the flow of something and having to find your passwords is a sure-fire way to break that focus. Even worse is when you can’t access a critical service because you hit the 3-try lockout!

I now use Roboform to encrypt and store all my passwords, as well as share them across all my computers. I can only imagine the time and frustration this program has saved me. There’s a free ten-password version if you fancy trying it out. I’m sure there’s Mac/Linux alternatives too if you’re a doting fanboy of either ;)

I FOUND A TO-DO LIST THAT MATCHES MY PERSONALITY

My day is too short to aimlessly meander with the hope I’ll achieve an objective. To-do lists are essential for me, but badly implemented they can errode my focus rather than sharpen it.

I recently discovered and fell in love with TeuxDeux – an intuitive web-based to-do list that beats everything else I’ve tried. Now I add all my tasks, and whichever ones are not completed today will be automatically moved onto tomorrow’s list. This is awesome for me, because I was well-known for finding forgotten to-do lists in my jeans pockets on washday.

Also, it’s an awesome to see all the completed tasks stacking up: in fact, it actually encourages more produtivity.

I RUTHLESSLY PRUNED MY RSS SUBSCRIPTIONS

I’m a big fan of RSS in Google Reader – I log in every morning and quickly scan down the list of new posts from bloggers I respect. But in reality, very few of these posts offer anything new and even fewer offer real, actionable insights into making money or achieving goals. Most offer nothing except appeal to my fear of missing some important tip, only to be fed some re-packaged best-practice guide on optimising my dog for Wordpress and attracting more comments from Twitter.

Some resources are just too good to lose however, so I cut my RSS reader down to just these:

• Viperchill
• Smart Passive Income
• Problogger
• Copyblogger
• Sugarrae
  (I’m in two minds about keeping this one, but I appreciate brutal honesty)
• Duct Tape Marketing
• SEO Book

From this point on, every website is going to have to invest in me before it will earn a place in my RSS reader.

CONCLUSION

This whole process has taken quite a lot of time, and has ironically distracted me from getting things done, BUT I consider it a worthwhile investment. This has been my stitch-in-time that will hopefully save nine, or something equally cliche. Already I feel I can think far clearer, work more efficiently and rest easier.

The process is far from finished, and here are a few things I’m still looking to achieve:

• Avoid any and all Flash games
• Stop visiting Reddit – There is no greater time-suck than this.
• Learning to say no more… read The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey
• Further developing a mindset of prioritisation

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this, and that you can find something valuable to add to your own approach.

I also hope you’ll leave a comment with your thoughts/additions/criticisms :)

• they have impressive figures to be proud of, and use them as a teaching aid – like Smart Passive Income or Viperchill (thanks to Glen for being cool about me copying his monthly report format).
• they’re fishing for advertisers or buyers.
• they have no figures whatsover and nothing to lose by being transparent.

Burn Down Easy falls squarely in the final category :)

This website hasn’t made me a single penny yet, and to be honest it’s my only website that I don’t have a financial interest in driving traffic to.

It’s my little, no-pressure island of zen, and well deserving of its name.

The aim of these monthly reports - and the whole website – is to help you move ahead with your own projects, by sharing what I’ve been working on and the lessons I’ve learned. If I can learn from you at the same time then I’ll be more the richer.

I know the figures are tiny but this is a benchmark if nothing else – they don’t reflect on my abilities as an SEO as I don’t stand to gain anything from ranking this site for any keywords.

Here’s the first of hopefully many monthy reports, complete with retro HTML tables:

Traffic Overview

The traffic spike is thanks to the My Blog Guest crowd – I designed a few banners for them to offer my support.

Subscribers

RSS and Email subscriptions have only just gone live… so you should subscribe :)

Top Referring Sites

Top Referring Keywords

Activity & Learnings

Both professionally and personally, March has been a really busy month.

Agency SEO has been great as usual – I feel lucky to be in the SEO industry at the moment, especially with an agency who invests into it as an established marketing channel.

I also soft-launched one of my own projects this month – that I’ll mysteriously refer to as Project Z – but underestimated the bug testing needed in a live environment.

Weird button combinations, unsupported characters, unruly images and so forth. Everytime I thought I’d finished finding bugs for my developers to fix, I’d discover a new one! My developers have been awesomely patient.

The soft launch was an excellent decision – no fanfare or expectations. It also meant my father and wife have done their fair share of bug testing too… even if they didn’t know it :)

Lessons I learned this month:

Better published than perfect.

There’s no chance I could have identified these bugs whilst still in beta: real-life scenarios and dirty data were needed to expose the cracks!

My projects laugh in face of any deadlines I have in mind.

I’d aimed to launch in December, then January, then February. The constant delays really got me down at one point (kudos to my wife for tolerating my dark moods).

Looking back on the infant state of Project Z then, I’m really glad for the extra time and objective distance this has given me. Some of these recent bugs could have been show-stoppers and it’s easy to lose perspective when you’re chomping at the bit to launch.

Last Minute Edit: It seems I’m not the only blogger inspired by Pat and Glen to publish a monthly report – Corbett over at Think Traffic is also running them too!

Anyway, I hope this gives you a taste of what’s to come on Burn Down Easy.
Feel free to subscribe and comment!

Most people know I’m a fan of guest posts as a high-quality way of acquiring links; it provides quality, fresh links and equally importantly, it forces the client’s link profile to stay relevant*

Essentially you provide an on-topic website with free, high quality content for their readership in return for an optimised link from within the article. Everyone is happy, and here’s the bonus: you’ll probably get some old-school on-topic visitors via the link too.

Anyway, back to My Blog Guest: It’s run by the ridiculously talented Ann Smarty and some helpful moderators, and it’s essentially a forum for blog owners and content writers to find mutually beneficial partnerships.

My experience so far
I’ve partnered up with a few websites in the travel industry recently and the results have been spot on: no tampering with my links, no no-follows, no dodgy iframe redirects or other BS. It’s early days yet, but I’m sure anyone taking content for nothing will soon get reported and banned.

Finding the right writer or website
I don’t have much time to check forums, but My Blog Guest makes scanning for suitable site owners very easy by allowing everyone to essentially tag their profiles; mine for example revolves around the travel industry whilst my copywriters have a much broader scope of clients they write and distribute for.

Isn’t it full of spammers?
Not yet: Ann and the mods do a great job of sorting the wheat from the chaff which for me is probably the reason I continue to use the service. I have no wish to spend hours researching and writing an awesome article for it to only end up on an Adsense farm.

Why build relationships with website owners in your topic?
Having working relationships with those influential bloggers who write about your niche comes in real handy when you’ve got a press release and want to get it picked up (bypassing those expensive online wires).

It can also give you better rates on advertising on their site or newsletter (*cough* sponsorship), or even just staying front-of-mind for when they feel like linking out – you do remember naturally obtained links don’t you ;)

* Now I know some people don’t feel link source relevance is an important factor in Google’s algorithm and chase any old high PR source, but I don’t. I feel the the logic is just too compelling to completely disregard relevance in link building.

That’s why a few of us got together in May and created the Manchester SEO Meetup, and its supporting Manchester SEO Linkedin Group.

So what is Manchester SEO Meet-up?

David Towers put it quite nicely back at the first curry and beer meetup in June:

It will all be informal, no presentations, no pitches – just a chance to meet up and talk SEO!

There were about 8 of us back then, and it’s since grown to over 25 – Turns out there are a lot more SEOs in Manchester than I thought – we had a bar full of onpagers, copywriters, linkbuilders, techs, account managers, blackhats, heads of departments and more.

Manchester SEO Meetup has no hard and fast agenda – people meet to share SEO tests and methods, find people to collaborate on projects, look for job opportunities, and just chill with like-minded agency and in-house SEOs.

Last night I had some great conversations about everything from Google Base, drop-shipping, SEO ‘celebrities’, golf, Google Wave, American bands, and both extreme demographics of the travel sector. I also drank lots of continental beer from a glass with a stem, which confused my northern mind no end.

Find out more about SEO Manchester Meetup

So if you’re an SEO in Manchester, or just interested in search in general, sign up to the Manchester SEO Linkedin Group and look out for the #mancseo hashtag on twitter to keep posted on when the next meetup will be.

Oh yeah, regrettably recruitment agencies are not welcome – there’s plenty of other events guys, but please respect that this one is just for us SEOs to chill without hearing about your latest commission-driven “fantastic opportunity in a leading North-West agency”.

Turns out both got banned for tweeting a URL – http:// cash – with – google .info

Not exactly breaking news, I hear you say. Hear me out…

It’s not just because this URL is on some spam list over at Twitter HQ. In fact it has been identified as contained Malware (which roughly translates to “bad/unhealthy stuff”).

So Twitter is now using Malware detection to

a) identify potential spammers
b) stop these tweets going public

Here’s your proof…

So why is this so interesting? Well it gives us an insight into the working of a spam detection system, a glimpse into the world of categorisation and sorting. Basically, it’s an element of an algorithm of an extremely popular social media platform.

If you still don’t think that’s interesting, then you’re probably on the wrong blog.

More reading…

SEOptimise

Rishi Lakhani at The Telegraph

Having just come back from the Think Visibility conference last night I feel recharged with motivation to finish my half-baked projects.

One of the consistent themes of the event was how easy it is to get distracted with planning, writing lists, drawing wireframes etc. without actually seeing an idea through to the end.

So a massive thanks to Dom Hodgson without an ‘e’ for the hard graft, along with all the other people who chipped in to make Think Visibility such a blast. Here’s just a few…

Joost De Valk – Some great tips on how to squeeze every inch (watt? horsepower?) of performance out of your Wordpress blog with regards to load speeds, optimising images, caching etc.

Interesting fact: the guy has over 50 active plugins on his wordpress blogs!

Julian Sambles – Head of Audience Development or something similar at The Telegraph speaking about the process of bringing SEO into a huge business and challenging established industry traditions. He didn’t mention anything about their off-page SEO of course!

Interesting fact: The unique traffic growth graph this guy showed us was staggering. Watch out The Guardian!

Judith Lewis – For a start she gave out chocolate to everyone. She could have talked about optimum keyword density and I would still have nodded contently. Great session about universal search and optimising rich media.

Interesting fact: I made everyone wait whilst I dug for a Cadbury’s Truffle.

Some other sessions I managed to get to and thoroughly enjoyed were Fiona Thompson from SimpleUsability on eyetracking and debunking the F pattern, and Karyn Fleeting of Tinderbox Media on corporate blogging.

Maybe next time I’ll try my hand at speaking? Or maybe I should buckle down and finish my myriad of unfinished projects first!

Links to other Think Visibility Writeups

Here’s all the writeups I can find – many of them in much more detail than mine. So if you want a link, drop me  a comment!

Photos

Photos from @sk8geek

Photos from James Inman

Session Slides

Tom Smith’s Session Slides

Writeups

Joost again on Julian’s Telegraph.co.uk session

Carla Marshall of Sorbet Digital

Simon over at Zath.co.uk

Rahoul Baruah (awesome name!) at 3HV

Kieron Hughes aka Web Toastie

Branded3’s Zoe Piper via Piggynap

Michael Heap gives the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Someone no-one’s really heard of

Pfft’s Chris Clarkson

Lynne Foster of PoLR

SEOidiot and the happy light. Plus check out the Yoast cufflinks!

Malcolm Slade of Epiphany

Objective

So, do internal links pass relevance from the second occurrence of a link to the same target URL?

Michael Martinez strongly refuted this claim with his own set of tests, but I only got around to reading this after my own tests were complete. The link is there for background reading if you feel like wading through industry politics.

Passing authority is something totally different and is not within the remit of this test – we want to test relevance… essentially, will a target page rank in the SERPs for a keyword if we send a link to it containing this keyword?

The Test

The test consisted of a two pages – a previously indexed parent page (/index.htm) and a brand new target page (/page2.htm)

Two simple links were placed on the parent page. Both were linked to /page2.htm with different anchor text – thromppluserism and prekemplisation.

<html>
<head></head>
<body>

<!--
Test started 10:37 19 March 2009
-->

<!--
This is url: /index.html
-->

<a href="/page2.htm">thromppluserism</a>
<a href="/page2.htm">prekemplisation</a>

</body>
</html>

I used these unique, gobbledygook keywords to remove any competing results in the SERPs. These words are completely new to Google so I feel confident there are few contaminating factors.

<html>
<head></head>
<body>

<!--
This is url: /page2.html
-->

<p>
content
</p>

</body>
</html>

So, after a decent wait for indexation, I searched for each of these two keywords on Google to see if /page2.htm came up in the results. If Rand was correct, the target page would not appear for a search for prekemplisation.

Results

thromppluserism
Two results in the SERPs – one for /index.htm as expected, and one for /page2.htm.

prekemplisation
One result in the SERPs – for /index.htm

Conclusion

It seems Rand is right on this one. The second internal link on a page does not pass any keyword relevance to the target page. The test is lightweight enough to replicate easily so I’ll probably do so before drawing any concrete conclusions.

It’s since been suggested to me that Google is smart enough to apply different rules to links in various page segments (e.g. header, main content, footer etc.) It’s far fetched in my opinion but theoretically possible – if anyone has an insight into this do give me a shout!

Practical Takeaways

Make sure the first link to a given target URL contains your yummy keywords. Having a sitewide link to HOME is probably the biggest culprit here.

Don’t try to fix navigation link anchors by adding contextual links further down the page or crafting the footer links.

This has a direct impact on ranking and therefore visits, and ultimately conversions, so forcefully argue the point with your clients by appealing to their commercial logic regardless of how much their design team wants to define navigation link text.

This anonymised data shows the amount of keywords on the first 3 pages of Google UK for 4 competing websites within a competitive market, each with their own SEO strategies run by different people (yes mine is the green one of course!).

Note how the dips affect all four whilst Google UK shakes things up.

If you’re not tracking your competitors then months like June could encourage unnecessary knee-jerk reactions as you watch your rankings plummet without any knowledge of the market.

Still not conviced? Here’s three other examples of entirely seperate industries and keywords that prove my point.

Note: Anyone who wants to check Google UK every day for a few competing websites for a selection of keywords can get this data. It’s industry specific data, not client specific. There is nothing within the data that can identify a website.