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The SEO effect of 1&1 A Year On

It has been a year since I had my issues with 1&1 Internet and decided to express my dissatisfaction at their service publicly and what I have learned from this saga is that “joe public” also like to get involved when they feel that they have been treated in an unfair manner or experienced poor customer service. Here’s the impact the response to my post had on SEO and social media, resulting in great rankings in the SERPs.

Search Traffic From 1&1 Terms

As you can see from Google Analytics, the traffic took about 8 months to gain momemtum as my blog naturally crept up the search results. The key date here being the end of August when not only was I solidly on the first page of Google for the term “1&1″ but 1&1 also started advertising on the TV, taking visits from 10-20 per day to 50-60 per day and even over a 100 on some days.

Ranking As Of Today

Below you can clearly see that my blog post ranks 4th, just above the page fold for the term 1&1

Search Queries

And here you can see the search queries this month (Jan 2012), albeit a low CTR, I would love to here suggestions about improving this from anyone.

Selection of search terms in Google Analytics

Takeaway

The public contributed over 100 comments on my 1&1 post and re-tweeted about the same amount of times. The post naturally generated some high quality links to my website, 5 highly relevant ones direct to the page. The full selection of keywords generated close to 7,000 visits over the last 12 months and if I have changed the title and description to something more inviting I believe I could have significantly improved the CTR and in turn increased the traffic via the search engines.

Now not every public rant is appropriate, and I’m not suggesting that you go and slag off the nearest company just to gain traffic and links to your website, however one thing to learn from this is that internet users like honesty and personal experience. They also like to contribute their own experiences too and many people are looking for help/advice. So how can this applied to your industry or to your clients? Are you making it is easy for people to get involved by either allow comments on your website or encouraging community. Are you creating engaging content that is relevant to people and invites them to contribute? What subjects can you or your clients pull in from personal experience and how can they turn these into great content.

Quite a few questions there, but great food for thought

I would love to hear your comments and if you have any great examples similar to this please feel free to share them!

Best

Gary

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Tags: 1&1, content, seo