People talk a lot about getting their site ranked on page one for key phrases, but I’ve never seen anyone experiment with getting OFF of page 1.
When one of your services is ranking clients on search engines using valuable content, understanding how search engines view older web content writing is an important question. It takes a lot of work to claim a key phrase for a client. By the time you’ve achieved a good ranking for a client on about 20 phrases, you start to worry that those you’re giving less attention to might start to fall off of page one.
It’s a valid concern because no one is quite sure how the Google algorithm – that mythical website ranking voodoo – really assesses the pages of our hard work. At ion Leap, we keep circling back to older phrases to add fresh content and work the pages using social media, but that will get overwhelming at some point.
There’s a phrase on ion Leap’s website that I worked very hard to get ranked on page one over a period of about 9 months using our very experienced content writers. It currently sits at page 1, position 5, that all-important above-the-fold spot. I can’t give out any more details on the phrase because someone may swoop in and try to push me down the page.
I’m currently testing the rate that content sitting neglected on a website will fall off of page 1 search engine results. The funny part is, I have very little data to go on:
- We SEOs suspect that freshness counts greatly, but that might depend on the competitiveness of the key phrase in question
- Social media chatter is believed to be a growing factor, yet after 9 months of no chatter whatsoever, we’re still ranked for that phrase
- At ion Leap, we’re always believed that content will win out in the end, and this phrase is backed by a very solid wall of content with good key phrase density and great SEO
- Competitiveness of the key phrase in question has grown, and a major software company has released a piece of software with the exact name of the key phrase (and you can bet they’re working that phrase), yet we’re still above them
Stay tuned for more on our web content writing neglect experiment
We’ll continue to report back on this experiment from time to time. What we may be seeing through this experiment is a move by the search engines to give even more rewards to valuable content writing. In our opinion, this would be a wonderful tweak to the algorithm.
