3 Real World SEO Examples: The Pages, The Phrases, and The Results

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There’s so much SEO advice out there. But not so much reporting on results.

So rather than write another how-to article, today we have a how-much article. We follow our own best advice, but then what happens? Does it rank? Does it get traffic?

Around half of the articles I write are search optimized. For these, I research keyphrases?(look at search results, consider intent, estimate competition) and then indicate relevance (use the phrase, answer related questions, work in the semantically related topics).

Usually, the page does ok. It ranks for something and gets a dozen or so daily visits. This adds up to thousands of visits over time. I’m happy with this.

Sometimes the results are much better. Sometimes, much worse.

Let’s break down the results for three real SEO examples. This post will answer the question, what does an SEO really do?

Note: These examples are blog articles, not sales pages. Sales pages target keyphrases with?different intent, but the process is the same.

SEO example 1: Underestimating the competition

Let’s start with the bad.

The page

People often ask us how to get started with content marketing, so over time, we’ve collected a lot of tips and advice. Eventually, we had a lot of raw material for an article and it was time to put a post together.

While researching keyphrases in the Moz Keyword Explorer, I noticed another super popular phrase: “how to start a blog."

Great! And the difficulty is 45, well below our Domain Authority. That means the average authority of the other high-ranking pages are lower than ours. So we should have a chance of ranking, right?

The plan

I wrote a super detailed article called?How to Start a Blog, complete with 4200 words of nice SEO copywriting, 21 tips, 11 contributor quotes and a video. It was about 20 hours of work. I really gave it my best.

The results

Did it rank? Nope!?This page ranks so low that it doesn’t show up in Moz. But SEMrush digs deeper so let’s check there…

It was basically an SEO failure. It ranks 88th for “how to have a blog.” According to Analytics, it attracts between zero and four visitors per day.

The?takeaway

So what went wrong?

I should have looked more closely at the backlink profiles of those high-ranking pages. Had I simply searched for the phrase with MozBar turned on, this is what I would have seen.

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