UK SEO Consultant | Just Search's Neil Walker

Well it’s been over three months since I carried out my Google Analytics Qualification and I thought it was about time to add another Google accreditation to my belt this time Adwords.

SEO has always been my main strength but it links so integral with Paid search that you have to be a full to ignore it. I have been dealing with Adwords accounts on and off for many years but it has been a long time since I got my hands dirty.

So the past month I have had an intense training session with my PPC Manager Phil and one of our PPC account manager’s Adil (Thank you both for you time.) It’s been a hard month of getting back to basic’s with all the changes which have happened in the past 6 months in Adwords, never mind what’s happened in the past two years, but anyway today was the day I carried out the second test.

For those who are unfamiliar with Google Adwords Qualification it now breaks into more than Just one exam, (Which I had a good few moon’s ago) it now breaks into the following:

Google Adwords Qualifications

• Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam
• Search Advertising Advanced Exam
• Display Advertising Advanced Exam
• Reporting & Analysis Advanced Exam

You have to have completed the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam before you take one of the advanced exams and become Google Qualified.

For me the first step after completing the Fundamentals Exam was to undertake the Search Advertising Advanced Exam, I carried this out today and I’m please to confirm I have passed

Next steps are to over the next 6 Months complete the other two Advanced Exams.

Further Information

You can find the link to my results here: Google Test Records

I’m a big fan of Bigmouthmedia, when I first got into Search many years ago with a brand new website for Just search and the hope of one day being on the first page for “SEO” Bigmoutmedia were ranked the first page and have been as long as I can remember. There was also Oyster-web, originally staff members of bigmouth but they have not ranked anywhere in years “wonder what happened to them?”

Anyway Bigmouth are always at the forefront as they have been for years but they have had a rocky time the past few years.

2006 – Bigmouth was suspect-idly banned for Excessive Hidden text spamming. I don’t really have a comment on the subject but there are some resources below where you can read up on it and form your own opinion.

• http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6276 – Post by Aaron Wall
• http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=10212 – Original thread about Bigmouth Listings
• http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/ – Web Archive of old Pages

2009 – Again chatter in the blogsphere around whether Bigmouthmedia had there site hijacked via a 302, either way there home page came out of the index for a short period. Resources below:

• http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/big-mouth-media-penalty.html – Dave Naylor
• http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/did-bigmouthmedia-302-hijack-themselves-out-of-google/ – Blogstorm

6th July 2010

I logged into Google today and did my tedious daily check of Just Search results, as the recent shift has dropped us some listings (Still first page for SEO

What I found is bigmouth media has a shortened listing – I.e. No title, description just a plain listing like either the site hasn’t been spidered in months or something similar.

Now my first thoughts would have been has the site gone down or a robots.txt file has a wrong instruction, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. We recently at Just search had our server go down Google bot spidered the site when it was down, however due to our link portfolio we were spidered again very quickly and we still showed some form of description. It was a very strange affect as Google displayed some results with the full listing and some with the cached listing from when the server went down.

This looks like something similar for Bigmouth as when carryout a “Site:www.bigmouthmedia.com” it does give a full description.

Conclusion

2:00 hours later (09:43) – This could be something crafty Bigmouth are doing to drive some natural links their way, again any publicity is good publicity, however I’ve written the post and showed link love to the resources, but for this post there is no reason to actually link to bigmouth, sorry

I was out for a drink last night with a few of the guys from the Manchester SEO linkedin Group. We were talking about the talent of SEO Companies in Manchester and the north and I joked about putting up a blog post about it. Well I was in work early so I though I’d put the information together to show who is the best at SEO in the UK is it:

1. Northerners
2. Midlanders
3. Southerners

The Criteria

Remember this is a fun post and so I could have had a look at load of different criteria but what I did was go to Google.co.uk and record the UK websites which rank on the first page for the terms:

• SEO
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimization
• Internet Marketing

Of course there are dozens of other phrases, which other companies rank for such as “UK SEO“, “Link Building” etc. So you may see some names missed of the list which you would have expected to see.

Initial Data

Visual Location

View North v South SEO’s in a larger map

The Results by Area

The Pie Chart below shows the count of website by area ranking on the first page of Google for one of the terms set out in the initial criteria.

It’s official Northerners are the winners!

The Results by City

Manchester SEO’s seem to have the largest percentage of the 1st page of Google with 14%!!

Coming back down to Earth

As stated at the start of this blog post, it is just a bit of fun, who’s the best at SEO in the UK, well I don’t think that the diagnosis above gives any justice as they are just vanity keywords and what’s the use in Ranking on the first page of Google for you company website if you don’t do a proper job for you clients.

So who’s the best at SEO in the UK? I’ll leave you with the segmented data of the number of websites ranking the first page by Area by each keyword i.e.

• SEO
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimization
• Internet Marketing

Unfortunatly the Pie Chart shows that on the first page of Google for the actual term “SEO” we’ll that’s dominated 50% by the South.

Love to hear you comments and have a good weekend.