Tracking progress of SEO while I learn the Internet biz: It’s not quick, but it’s not slow either.

byRealBizMan

70 followers

10 years ago

(BTW I don’t re-read my blogs – so sorry about typos, grammar, spelling etc…)

I have this other side business that I put together mostly because I had nothing else to do and I had a vacation property to rent out for the summer. So I found a booking engine and customized the front end then went out and gave away some free listings to other cottage owners to get some content. I then posted my rental with a competitor of mine to see how the business works. My competitor, applause to them, have rented out 7 of 11 weeks already and the season doesn’t start till the end of June. I then hired an SEO guy offshore as they were way cheaper of course to do on-page and off-page optimization, so now that I had this service I was paying for that I couldn’t see I need to track it.

A free tool I use to see what’s going on with my SEO is ahrefs.com. What I’m looking for is change/progress. I’m not an SEO expert by any means but I do know if I am paying someone who says they are an SEO expert that I should be able to see something happening from an independent source, and my SEO person doesn’t know I’m doing this.

I picked ahrefs.com because it was one of the 3 or 4 SEO reporting sites that was always coming up when I was Googling about SEO.

Anyways what I do is put in my URL (muskokacottagerentals.org) as often as I can (you are only allowed once a day on the free site), and track my results in Excel. I’m not all that sure what the data means, but I do see it moving in the positive direction. That means I will pay for another month of SEO and as long as I see it progressing I will be happy. Of course it’s my responsibility to learn what the data means. I do know that backlinks, which are links to my site, help with the credibility of the site and therefore should help in the overall ranking. Backlinks have to be relevant and not just any old backlink and the backlink site has to also be credible.

Here is the data I’ve tracked. I’m not sure why URL Rank column is so volatile, again my responsibility to find out and as I always tell my employees of my bricks and mortar business “go to the source”. So I will contact ahrefs.com and find out what my data means – stay tuned.

Here’s the data to date.

I did also sign up for a free trial of MOZ, they just sent me a report that one of my keywords “muskoka cottage rental” is now ranked 39. That is not bad since a couple weeks ago it wasn’t found in the first 10 pages of Google.

I will write about the other marketing tactics I am using with this site if anyone is interested.