Minor SEO Changes, Major SEO Effect on a Minor Site

It’s very satisfying to spend a great deal of time developing a new site from scratch for a client, taking pains to ensure that the site is search-engine friendly, and then to see that site do well in the search engines after launch.

But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.

I recently spent less than a half day working a small site (about 5 pages) for a client. I didn’t build the site; it already existed when the client came to me, looking for help to get better search engine placement.

I did minor, basic, SEO 101 type things: I wrote custom title tags and description meta tags for each page. I added appropriate alt text to all the images. I cleaned up the html a little, to use proper h1 and h2 headings. None of this was rocket science, nor even high-level SEO.

Almost right away, the site started performing better in the search engines. From last September through March 10, the site had been found for a grand total of 7 different search phrases, most of which were some variation of the company’s name. I worked my “SEO magic” on March. 10. From March 11 to today, March 28, the site has been found for 46 different search phrases, many of which are excellent keyphrases for this company, and traffic has increased tenfold.

This site has only 6 pages, virtually no backlinks, and no marketing or advertising budget to speak of. The company’s service is a very small, narrow, geographically limited niche which will never draw hundreds or thousands of visitors per month. But within days of the small changes I made to the site, the site was drawing targeted organic search traffic at levels previously undreamed of.