Many SEOs felt there were some volatile changes to the Google UK algorithms in June. They weren’t wrong either – June’s SERPs for competitive industries saw some pretty significant tweaks. Call it Vince if you like.
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.
Tags: algorithms, google, vince
August 6th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Good research David. SEO info is just so much more useful when backed up with facts rather than speculation – may even end up showing this to clients as proof of the crazyness in the SERPs over the last few months.
August 6th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Cheers Matt, I’ve seen one particular industry follow the opposite pattern of the graphs above – but the dynamic points are still consistent.
You’re more than welcome to use this for your clients. Without going into detail too much, the industries were very different, so you can take it as a given that the shake-up was widespread.
August 6th, 2009 at 3:59 am
Interesting.
Just to clarify for a non SEO professional. Am I correct in thinking that you monitored the ranking for 4 separate sites in unrelated industries for unrelated keywords?
Can I also ask what tool(s) you used to monitor this and produce the graphs? (Are the graphs dynamically generated?)
August 6th, 2009 at 4:12 am
Hi David
Great set of stats and some very interesting results. Very reflective of what we have seen as well. I would be interested in understanding which of the companies tracked are major (authority) brands. I would suggest that the Green is an authority brand (as well as great SEO on your part).
Garry
August 6th, 2009 at 5:17 am
@Pete – I don’t use any automated tools of course, because that’s against Google’s guidelines. But if I did it would need to be very advanced and would be able to surf the web to check for ranking.
@Garry – The companies are a healthy mix. They are selected based on rankings and personal choice of the client at the benchmarking stage. I think the concept of an authority brand can be very different between online and traditional media.
August 6th, 2009 at 5:28 am
@David. Ah, I see.
August 15th, 2009 at 3:43 am
Great charts and yes there is nothing like real data to support SEO claims. Here is some SEO data of our own which matches your data quite well, however we have not seen that level recovery. None of these urls are our clients.