How good is on page SEO

It’s not often I get the chance to do a little testing of a site’s natural strength without external factors effecting it so when one of my clients mentioned they wanted their new site to go live but not to market it yet I was quite pleased.

I have always wondered how effective on-page SEO is if it is the only marketing used. This gave me the ability to test it.

Granted it is still very early days but here is some info I have managed to gather – first some background:

1. The site is for a marketing agency I consult for – it’s their digital site – www.seriousdigitalideas.com
2. It has a whole section which talks about industry related topics – each page is geared up for certain keywords/phrases but only really a normal amount of SEO – the amount you’d expect from any normal company who know their stuff.
3. No backlinks have been aquired (other than their other site linking to it)
4. The site gets very little traffic (the best so far has been 10 people in one day – and one of them was me!)
5. It has a PR of Zero
6. The site has been up for 2 months and has only had a handful of blog posts added since launch
7. The only hint to the external world that it exists is that it has a WordPress blog which submits its sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Ask

So, as the site is pretty much a total unknown my first thought was that you would be lucky if one person finds the site.

My second thought was that I doubt it would rank anywhere in Google for any keyword because it was gearing up to take on the SEO and Online Marketing world – pretty hardcore arena!

Some of my findings are as follows – obviously these results are UK focused

1. No 1 Google ranking for “serious digital” keywords – which wasn’t hard as it is the site’s name
2. No 7 on Google for “trusted backlinks”
3. No 3 for “Serious online marketing” (UK results)
4. No 3 for “Google agency day”
5. No 7 for “link bait ideas” (UK results)
6. No 3 for “Cocitation” (UK results)
7. No 3 for “serious link building” (UK results)
8. No 7 for “affiliate and referral marketing” (UK results)
9. No 8 for “serious affiliate marketing” (UK results)
10. No 14 for “Serious referral marketing schemes” – No 3 if UK selected

Now these are only a few that I have managed to find – some are long tail some are good keywords – but it appears that, definately on Google, good content with a little bit of care and attention to how it is constructed really does give you a sound grounding for any SEO campaign.

I’m looking forward to actually starting work on marketing and fully SEOing the site – will maybe post some proper results later.

If you have any thoughts on the above or anything like it I’d love to hear them – just comment below.