Cleethorpes SEO

After checking my rankings yesterday for the phrase "cleethorpes SEO", I noticed that my site had been knocked off the top position by another website: www.website-solutions-uk.co.uk. I used competator analysis to look into the reasons why this site had overtaken me, and couldn't find a definitive answer to the question of why this site appears top of google for cleethorpes SEO but is only on page 4 of google for Lincolnshire SEO.

Competitor Analysis

Looking at the home page of the website solutions site, the metatags are as follows:

page title - this says:

"Web design Cleethorpes, SEO and Programming in Lincolnshire"

the meta description says:

"Ecommerce web design, search engine optimisation and programming in Lincolnshire" (which is probably too short for a decent meta description)

and the meta keywords say:

"lincolnshire ecommerce web design, design and advertising, design advertising, creative photography, print management, web designers, web design, web design services, web design software, small business web design, cheap web design, web analytics, packaging design, internet services, web graphic design, web page design, web design company, websites, web design development"

The filenames of the PHP files on the site are all lincolnshire based, eg: seo-lincolnshire.php, website-programming-lincolnshire.php, internet-designers-lincolnshire.php, content-management-systems-lincolnshire.php. The image names are similarly optimised for the Lincolnshire keyword: web-design-lincolnshire/web-designers-lincolnshire.jpg, web-design-lincolnshire/ecommerce-lincolnshire.jpg, web-design-lincolnshire/ecommerce-systems-lincolnshire.jpg

The backlinks to the site from google are few, and none of them have decent keywords in the link text. There is only one page on the site that has any real mention of Cleethorpes, and that is this page: http://www.website-solutions-uk.co.uk/houses-for-rent-cleethorpes.html which is a spammy looking page about renting houses in Cleethorpes (without any real information on it, just the general blocks of text that you would expect to find in a page thats just been added for the benefit of SEO).

There is one website, http://www.uk-used-cars.com/ which was built by this company and has the keywords of cleethorpes featured quite heavily in them, but this is ony a weak association with the main site. There are no cleethorpes keywords in any links back to the web design company's website.

Why does this site rank well for Cleethorpes SEO?

With few relevent pages, only the title tag and one page on the site about Cleethorpes, it got me wondering why that site is now number 1 in google for the phrase Cleethorpes SEO. The current theory is this:

its all my fault

Why? well, in the process of SEO zooming, I might have unintentionally associtated the keywords of Cleethorpes and Lincolnshire in the context of SEO. Google learns from experience which words are synonyms of each other, for example, if you type in the phrase 'designer menswear' you will also expect to see sites titled 'mens jeans', 'mens clothing' and 'designer clothes for men'. Google is not explicitly told which words are associated or synonyms, it learns this through a complex process of natural language processing. For example if you put in the phrase "pupil contraction" into google, you should find pages relating to eyes, and not students. Where google sees the two same keywords used in conjunction, it learns to associate the words as possibly synonyms. What I might have done in refocussing the SEO from Cleethorpes SEO to Linconlshire SEO is to associate 'Cleethorpes' as being synonymous with 'Lincolnshire'. therefore, when the website solutions site changed their home page title to include 'cleethorpes', google must have thought that they meant the 'Lincolnshire' version of the keyword, and so all the lincolnshire links, filenames and page titles were re-read to be cleethorpes links and filenames - hence the site that was more specifically tailored for 'lincolnshire SEO' - is now doing rather well for 'Cleethorpes SEO'

Am I bovvered?

Does this then mean that I should focus the site back to Cleethorpes SEO? No. This site is ranked in the top 3 places in google for Cleethorpes SEO, Lincolnshire SEO and Grimsby SEO, so retreating from the more popular keyword 'Lincolnshire SEO' back to the more long tailed keyword - Cleethorpes SEO would be a bad idea. The rankings for the currently focussed keyword of Lincolnshire SEO would drop and I might get back to position 1 for Cleethorpes SEO, but at the cost of lower traffic. A pyrric victory at best.

Although, it is interesting that a company in Louth would decide to focus their SEO efforts on Cleethorpes, when there are bigger more lucrative local markets like Lincoln, Scunthorpe, Grimsby, Doncaster and even Hull. I wonder if they are subscribers to this blog and are using the SEO Zooming technique described on this website?