For any website, to be able to rank onto the Top 10 or SERP1 on Google for any desirable keyword, indeed is a unicorn of sort.

For many keywords, they are dominated that super high powered websites that tends to dominate many other key words as well. Websites like Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, ebay, Alibaba, YouTube, etc… usually easily take up at least half of all the positions on SERP1. Tutorials sites, major news outlets often dominate others keywords that are relevant to their respective content.

For example of my client, ClayartTouch (clayartouch.com.sg), whom is number 1 globally ranked website for “clay figurine”, just check out who are on the rest of the SERP1:

In fact, ClayartTouch.com.sg had 2 entires (in both 1st and 2nd place in SERP1). Who are the rest?

• eBay (ecommerce giant)
• Wikipedia (content giant)
• WonderHowTo (tutorial)
• Clay-it-now.com (tutorial)
• Youtube (video giant – tutorial)
• qoo10 (ecommerce giant in Singapore)
• Google (Google’s Arts & Culture – Google’s own page)

There is only 9 entires, because the “first entry” is Google Images.

So now, assuming that you are a new competitor to Clayart Touch, what would you think would be the difficulty to get to SERP1?

Ans: It would almost be impossible. 

This is a reality for a lot of battlegrounds on the Search Engine. Easily, half or more of the slots will be taken up by giants (tutorials sites are notoriously powerful on search rankings) – thus the actual number of “realistic slots” for your website to fight for against your business competitors on SERP1, could actually be just 1-3 slots.

Which means, 10 or even 100 companies (or more) could be fighting all for that 1 realistic slot on SERP1 (usually the incumbent would be extremely hard to unseat, thus even if there is 3 slots, only 1 or if you are lucky, 2 slots, is anywhere near realistically viable).

So, to manage your expectations: always remind yourself, 10 slots in SERP1 does not mean 10 slots that you can fight for. Usually, there is only between 1 – 3 slots that will be fought over between you and your competitors. So, its no easy task to achieve a common desire, “I want to rank on the first page of Google” – because, it is really not that easy.

[ SERP between 22 – 28 November 2017 ]
note: some keywords that are missing from previous week, is not because the website is no longer ranked on those keywords, but rather there is no impression of our result for those keywords over the past week; and those keywords that ever appeared but not last week, the performance will be based on the last time it appeared

Joji.co

Joji.com.sg

Analysis:

Generally, while many minor positive movements, there is nothing very major to report on.

We will continue to monitor the progress of the rankings, while we try to finish whatever is on hand to continue working on the content to be put up on the respective websites.

If you do not already know, SEO takes time to get your website ranked. If fact, at times, it takes a very very long time before your website will get to the first page of your desired search term.

So during last week’s analysis of the SERP for Joji.com.sg and Joji.co, I mentioned that I gonna do something for Joji.com.sg – I wasn’t able to find time to do them. But the lack of action does reveal some things I would like to share: your website’s content continues to work for you even when you did not do anything for SEO.

Thus the evil trade of SEO
SEO industry in a lot of cases is indeed really poisonous. Many SEO companies charges large sums of money, claiming that they will work on your SEO over 6 months or 1 year – actually does almost virtually nothing. As a result, SEO companies gradually gather a really bad reputation for being “cheats” or “waste of money”. This phenomena was also the reason why Joji got into SEO at the first place.

To do it right.
Joji started to do research and study into SEO, and experimented on selected client’s and another personal business website. Overtime, the websites ranked incredibly well on their respective vital keywords – which the techniques, strategies and methods used is then used to create the SEO offerings we are now offering through Joji.com.sg.

But the clients are “broken.
However, it is also after we started offering our SEO that we then realised, how most clients do not actually understand SEO and how it works. What is worse, is when clients have a mislead understanding of SEO and how SEO is actually done. As a result, miscommunication happened between me and one of my client just recently.

How SEO actually works?
When you “does SEO” on a web page – what you are actually doing, is to create relevant content for the desired keyword that you are targeting. Which also meant that, once you do it – you done it. Its 1 time. You only need to do it ONE TIME – for that web page. There is no logic in “consistently working on the same web page” if the web page is already done well the first time round. The only reason to continue working on the same web page, is to improve the content and its relevance – as well as improving the UX.

It is not the change what you have already done. Because if you change away the text that was previously already recorded by the search engine, when the robot from Google is back again, it will detect that the content had changed, and it will wipe the previous records in the Google index – and any positive gains in the rankings will be wiped out.

Be patience.
If you made a lot of effort into the SEO of your web page or web site – then have some confidence. Give it sometime to “battle other websites” and slowly gain ground in the targeted battlefields.

[ SERP between 15 – 21 November 2017 ]
note: some keywords that are missing from previous week, is not because the website is no longer ranked on those keywords, but rather there is no impression of our result for those keywords over the past week; and those keywords that ever appeared but not last week, the performance will be based on the last time it appeared

Joji.co

Joji.com.sg

Analysis:

Like the title of this episode “SEO Takes Time”,  this week’s SERP results indeed prove the point.

So first looking at the obvious change, is the tremendous number of new entries for Joji.co’s SERP results. The main reason is that the SEO episodes from the website is now finally index by the Google engine. Of course, the current rankings of virtually all of the new keywords are practically “useless”. In Joji’s SEO concept/theory – ranking beyond SERP5 is as good as not getting ranked. But of course, looking at the long term SEO war, it is still important to at least be indexed – it will serve as the foundation for the website to climb up the rankings.

Looking a joji.com.sg, which is the “SEO Takes Time” example, literally nothing was done to the website over the past week, due to other work commitments – joji.com.sg somehow continued to improve on its SERP positions. A few new keywords are ranked, and a good number of the keywords improved upon their last SERP position. 14 of the 23 keywords is ranked in the sweet spot: the SERP1-5 positions – although 2 of them is hijacking the search term for the Joji Bar, a new bar that was opened in Singapore rather recently that happened to called themselves the exact same name as us. Their website is Joji.sg (thus is a little irritating, and I’m sure they hate us too… haha)

We are still looking to work further on Joji.com.sg – but hopefully we are able to find time to work on it.

So remember, SEO takes time!

Many of us makes the mistake of building a website, and believe that traffic and business will just flow to our website automatically.

Often, we missed out on a very “common sense” question: how are these traffic and business going to reach your website.

“Google!”

Yes, often people uses search engine to find what they are looking for, and hopefully you are who they are looking for – but are you on the search engine?

Is your website listed in the search engines?

How websites ended up on search engines?

Search engine deploys crawlers – software-version of robots – that explores the vastness of the internet and add the websites they found into their database. In another word, websites do not automatically appear in search engines – they are actually added into the database “manually”. In order to be listed in any search engine, the search engine will first need to know that you exist – and then they will send a crawler to your website to discover what is your website about, what are the content, what is on the website, etc… and then return all these results into the search engine and get the web pages listed accordingly to the respective keywords the crawler/search engine suppose your web page / web site is about.

Thus the key thing to understand is that, if the search engine do not know you exist, they may never be able to list you on their search engine.

So how do we submit website to search engines?

Actually, a quick search on Google (ironically), you can actually find this answer. Typing “submit website to search engines” will automatically bring up a number of online applications/websites that will happily help you submit your website to, not just Google, but submit your website to search engines of all kinds. For example entireweb.com, a free site submission service that helps to submit your website to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even forgotten engines like Excite and Lycos.

Alternatively, you can submit your website directly to Google (which I personally find it to be “safer”) at Google’s webmaster submit url tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

Doing submissions are one of the most important part of any SEO service or SEO operation. And its also probably one of the worst protected, yet largely unknown secret about SEO.

So remember: do your submission and build your traction today!

[ SERP between 8 – 14 November 2017 ]

Joji.co

Joji.com.sg

Analysis:

Finally, joji.co is starting to have some movement in the SERP, with a few additional keywords ranked, regarding Blue/Red Ocean Strategy. However, we do not expect joji.co to be able to hold this positions, given the lack of traction and posting in regards to these topics. More postings and better postings will be required.

Joji.com.sg had a leaner list of keywords ranked, with certain obscured keywords falling off the SERP, like “seo ranking guarantee in singapore”. Certain keywords had improved in their SERP, like “flyer design singapore” and “electronic direct mailer” had improved dramatically, with “electronic direct mailer” now on SERP2 – which is fantastic. As the changes are mostly positive (green), we will continue to monitor to see if this positive trend can continue.

Meanwhile, we will create a blog for joji.com.sg and to start adding some past work to populate into the website. As for joji.co, as we missed out on our Strategy posting last week, we will need to write a Strategy article this week to keep up the effort.

Today we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of the domain url that you buy: a local one like .com.sg or an international one like .com ; what is the difference?

First we look at how much have our rankings for joji.co and joji.com.sg had changed over just 1 week after we did our SEO Diagnostic and Optimization on them (you can enquire the same service for your own website here: http://joji.com.sg/search-engine-optimization-seo/)

You can check our original rankings before the SEO Optimization in our last episode of the SEO “Tuesday” (we are switching it to Thursday from Episode 2 though) – http://joji.co/2017/10/31/seo-episode-1-lets-do-seo-tuesday/

[ SERP between 1 – 7 November 2017 ]

Joji.co
joji hesitate 7.3
hesitate joji 8.0
joji samples 43.0
joji 87.0

Joji.com.sg
joji logo 1.2
joji singapore 4.8
microsite design 6.0
corporate booklet 8.5
edm mailer 10.0
electronic mailer 10.0
joji bar singapore 10.0
joji samples 23.0
electronic direct mailers 26.0
electronic direct mailer 34.0
advertisement poster design 44.0
flyer design singapore 47.0
electronic direct mailer design 52.0
joji wallpaper 61.5
seo ranking guarantee in singapore 61.7
seo ranking guarantee singapore 72.0
singapore seo ranking guarantee 72.0
leads generation singapore 93.0
sem singapore 126.3
search engine marketing singapore 159.8
search engine optimization singapore 268.3

Comparing the rankings this week and the last week’s, we can see that there is a slight increase of ranked keywords, as well as a marked improvement of the relevant keywords (with the irrelevant one dropped off) for Joji.com.sg. As for Joji.co, there are no meaningful change.

——-

Today’s focus is on: Should you buy a local domain url like .com.sg or get an international one like .com (or .co, for our case)

When you buy a .com or a .co domain name, what you will find is that your website will now compete on the international stage (or market). After a week, joji.co remained to be more or less “invisible” on Google. Contrasting that with joji.com.sg ranked keywords, almost half of the keywords now are on SERP6 or better, and improving. (Both redesigned websites are launched around the same time, with both hardly ranked on Google.)

Why is it so?
Because when a website is on a local domain, it will now mainly compete only on the local market almost exclusively. As a result, because of the lower number of competition in each respective market segments, its a lot easier to get ranked and ranked well. And not forgetting that, we are only at the start of our SEO journey, and the website had only been ranked around just a week. There are still a lot of opportunity for us to continue to work on our Traction Content Strategy ( Traction Content Strategy ) and to slowly fight our way up the SERPs.

On the international front, joji.com.sg will likely never be seen beyond Singapore, but joji.co is literally living and breathing the international market. Thus for an international website domain like joji.co, it is imperative to invest in a good Content Strategy or Traction Content Strategy (with Joji, or do it yourself, after learning from us via this SEO series) to slowly build up credibility, number of relevant good web pages/articles and become “relevant” to users.

In the entire battle for the SERP1, its actually all about relevance. If anyone is selling you “SEO packages” that last a few months – I think either they are still living in the past using black hat tactics or outdated methods; or they are simply scamming your money. SEO means “Search Engine Optimization”, especially for static websites, which means that once you optimized your website – it SHOULD be optimized.

And in all honesty, Google had already came a long way since the days where they need their robots to understand the content of your website by reading the clues left behind by you in the meta tag or “relevance” via peer-to-peer links – all these are no longer very much useful. In SEO (and I mean the one that we do it only once), we still do a good portion of those legacy SEO methods, but mainly just as a “better safe than sorry” action rather than something that is still backed by “evidence”

So who is your target market? Is your business running mainly within a country / state, or is it an international company that do business across the globe? Choose wisely.

As you can see, a .com.sg can fight efficiently in a local context, but it can’t win internationally (or very hard). While a .com requires a significant amount of time in order to get within SERP1-5 (the effective SERP range) given how much water we need to tread through – literally hundreds of ranking positions. So if you are an international business – you need to start early – and start right. Doing a bad SEO or having a bad content strategy waste money and waste time. Fight early, fight right, and be patience – and you will slowly climb up the SERP ladder (given that you have a good website in place to ensure your SEO do not suffer from poor UX (User Experience) and massive “bouncing”.

If there is still something you do not understand, feel free to talk to via email : enquiry@joji.co

Have a good week ahead!

This is the first post of the SEO Tuesday series – to follow the journey of joji.co and joji.com.sg, both newly revamped website with absolutely rubbish Google rankings, and see how it rise up to the top of Google search in various keywords.

Other than the watching the paint dry (yeah, sometimes it really that boring), we will be talking and sharing about SEO, Traction Content Strategy (yeah, this is a Joji thing), review of other websites that Joji had done SEO for as well as sharing some other SEO opinions/tips/ideas by other people.

Joji.com.sg and Joji.co had been around for sometime, especially joji.com.sg. However due to internal shuffling, changes as well as procrastinations, joji.com.sg old website had been taken off for some time, and as a result, any build up rankings on Google are already all but absolutely rubbish now. Today, when we google (in Singapore), all we see is a Singapore bar that happened to choose exactly the same name as our company, and a number of random people’s website/social media accounts that happened to call Joji.

“Joji” as a keyword would be the “easy” market to conquer (yes, this is how we look at Google Search Rankings, so this will be how we will be addressing the various keywords, so you should get used to it). Since this is the low hanging fruit, we will be focusing on this up to the point we rank on the SERP1 (Search Engine Ranking Page 1) – and along the way, we will explain why this is easy, what we did and we can also be able to track how fast what we do, actually brings tangible results.

So below are the current complete ranking of both websites on various keywords. Just to put things into context, every SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) have 10 organic results, thus for example, Joji.co is ranked 41, it will be ranked 1st on the SERP5 of keyword “joji”.

Joji.co
joji hesitate 5.8
hesitate joji 6.3
joji 41.0
blue ocean shift 51.0

Joji.com.sg
joji logo 4.0
joji hesitate 5.0
joji singapore 5.1
hesitate joji 5.7
logo design competition 6.5
joji bar singapore 8.3
joji samples 18.0
sem advertising 25.0
sem advertising singapore 32.0
flyer design singapore 37.0
joji sample 49.0
sem singapore 128.6
leads generation singapore 140.0
search engine marketing singapore 152.4
singapore lead generation 167.0

So we are not going to pretend that any of these blog post does not affect the rankings: it does. But I’m definitely not the only guy in the world blogging or posting about certain topics or stuff online – but why some websites still cannot rank despite the tremendous amount of blog posts they had written: and thats the million dollar question.

Some projection, we will be doing our “SEO thing” and get this post as well as other posts ranked, and we should be able to see some change next Tuesday when we relook at the SERP results

So lets talk some long term SEO objective for Joji.co and Joji.com.sg.

For Joji.co, this website will be interested to be ranked well in keywords related to “Business”, “Strategy”, “Design”, “SEO” as well as “Blue Oceans” – as it is our objective to get Joji.co to be a good website for people who would like to find out a different perspective or the learn about strategy, design as well as a synthesis between the two, as well as SEO.

For Joji.com.sg, is mainly is main page for the branding, website design, graphic design, as well as SEO & SEM services targeting the Singapore market. So any keywords that can help to bring potential clients to reach us – would be awesome.

So what is the challenge?

First we need to first understand, there is a huge difference between Joji.co and Joji.com.sg – its the domain region the website is on.

When you are on .com or .co, your website is sitting on the “international market” – which means you are generally competing internationally against the entire world.

When you are on .com.sg or any other local domain, like .co.uk or .com.my – your website is sitting in the “local market” and it will generally be viewed by the search engine as a website that mainly serves only the local market.

So for Joji.com.sg, it is serving the Singapore market. And when Joji.co is pit against Joji.com.sg on Google Singapore (google.com.sg), Joji.com.sg will have an absolute advantage over Joji.co. Joji.co will need to have proven traffic from the Singapore market in order to be seen as a “relevant search result” to get ranked well on Google Singapore.

But on the downside, Joji.com.sg will have tremendous trouble getting ranked on Google.com as well as foreign markets. For example, Joji.co will have absolute advantage of Joji.com.sg to rank in Google UK (google.co.uk) or any other foreign markets.

So it will be interesting to look at this 2 websites, and observe how this 2 website will progress and what are the difference.