The Invisible “Seo Bristol” Factors

Lessons from a keyphrase: “SEO Bristol“

Until recently, I had always thought of the ‘Google Algorithm’ as a single entity. But Google have recently cast some light on their working practices and informed us rather gnomically that there are 50-200 algorithms in operation. I have a rough understanding of what they might mean by this, but at least it makes one thing abundantly clear. When you hear an internet marketer lamenting the fact that all of his clients’ sites are up in the serps, except for one obstinate, adamantine site that is lodged on page 6, you now know a possible explanation. Namely that a different algorithm is in operation in that particular market, and whichever one size fits all seo formula that particular internet marketer uses, it might just need some tweaking.

In fact it follows that if there are a multiplicity of algorithms, then every individual SEO campaign has the potential to be unique, not just as defined by the strength of the competition, but also by the ranking metrics Google is using for every individual particular keyword. The tactics you use with one particular seo campaign may not work as well with another, simply because Google is using different ranking metrics in different places. Of course the differences between the different algorithms are known only to Google, and as they themselves attest, they won’t even know which algorithm is in force for a particular keyword, an admission that suggests they either use a carousel of algorithms for individual keywords, or, much more likely, they create composite algorithms. My best guess here is that they have maybe a core set of algorithms and they create permutations out of them, maybe with some sort of meta algorithm controlling the process. This is purely speculation, but it would allow them to modify results by turning up one of the individual algorithms. I suppose the best analogy would be a sound studio, and the control a music producer has over a recording.

Whichever way we cut it, it is clear that different keywords perform differently. This is most evident when we see that some results show things like news or videos on the first page of results, whilst others do not. In the example of a local keyword like “SEO Bristol“, we might expect to see localised results from Google Places interspersed within the normal seo results. In the actual case of “seo Bristol”, we were required to make some modifications to our strategy….

The Visible “Seo Bristol” Factors

Around June 2011, our site fell in the rankings for the search term “seo Bristol“. We noticed at the same time that Google had for the first time started to include local Google Places results in the overall results. Since our site was not particularly well optimised for Google Places at that point, we developed a working hypothesis:

Google had added a much stronger Places element into the algorithm for “SEO Bristol”, and as a result our site had taken a bit of tumble.

This was corroborated by a shift at the top of the rankings. The previous top bananas, Freelanceseobristol.co.uk and Strategyinternetmarketing.co.uk were usurped at that time by Bigg Seo, which had claimed both the first and second spots. First spot with a natural ranking, and second spot, significantly, with a Google Places ranking. All this seemed to add significant weight to our initial hypothesis. Clearly something had changed in the evaluation process.

The Nature Of Seo

This to some extent is how SEO works, it is a dynamic science, and things are always changing. Traditionally sites fluctuated in the rankings as a direct result of search engine optimisation strategies; however more recently, Google seems to be modulating the results to a far greater extent. To use the crude music studio analogy, they have gone from a primitive 4-track to 16-track and beyond. There seems to be a far greater amount of evaluation going on, which requires seo practitioners to be a lot more on their toes. In the case of “seo Bristol”, we needed to go back to the drawing board, and work out why our Google Places listing was under-performing. We conducted a series of evaluations and tests, and eventually made the relevant adaptions to our Places listing that hoisted it into the mainstream. As soon as that took place, our “seo Bristol” ranking was concurrently improved.

Of course this took a few days to execute, but to some extent I am showing you a day in the life of an seo practitioner. An ongoing cycle of tweaking, testing, hypothesizing, and executing. Or maybe in my case, a day in the life of an “seo Bristol” practitioner.