For all those who have struggled with their own choices regarding SEO I hope this post is useful.  By way of backstory, The SoundView Group has (quite proudly I’ll admit!) been a page one resident for searches on “Los Angeles Marketing Consultant” in Google for approximately the past 6 months; after quite a bit of personal SEO effort over the past year.  Despite competition and despite the entrance of aggregators like Biznik and Thumbtack which pushed down my ranking for Los Angeles Marketing Consultant, we had doggedly hung in there on the first page.

If you search now for Los Angeles Marketing Consultant you will, however, note that SoundView Group is alas no longer on page one.  We are now on page two – and likely to fall further I suspect.  For better or for worse this is, however, no accident, but rather an example of both a conscious choice and the fairness of the Google search algorithm.  What do I mean by this?

Well, The SoundView Group has been expanding, and while Seth Baum is indeed a Los Angeles Marketing Consultant, going forward we had made the conscious decision to live up to the “Group” in the company’s moniker.  That is, as we start to become more of a Los Angeles Marketing firm, or Los Angeles Marketing agency, or Los Angeles Marketing company, it felt less and less appropriate to have onsite copy and offsite referrals to the company designate us a “Los Angeles Marketing Consultant.”

So I made changes to the copy both at www.soundviewgroup.com and on various other locations that better reflected the company’s new positioning as a Los Angeles Marketing Firm or Los Angeles Marketing Agency rather than a Los Angeles Marketing Consultant – and very quickly found myself (appropriately) penalized by Google – and there went our coveted page one Google position for Los Angeles Marketing Consultant.

Make no mistake – I shed a tear for the loss of the ranking – especially because The SoundViiew Group doesn’t show up until 5-10 pages in for Los Angeles Marketing firm, or Los Angeles Marketing agency – in fact we show up best right now for Los Angeles Marketing – which while not as descriptive may indeed be what most people are searching for (after Los Angeles Marketing Consultant of course).  But I like to view it as as challenge — the same one we took on over 18 months ago – it will be fascinating to see if we can once again find ourselves moving up the SERPs through our own incremental efforts – but now for Los Angeles Marketing instead of Los Angeles Marketing Consultant.