Google Rank Improvement!
Posted: December 16th, 2009 | Author: admin | Category: marketing, news
It looks like the strategies I’ve employed in previous posts have paid off. As you can see from the attached photos, my Google rank keeps rising, albeit slowly.
Now, when I log out of Google (because Google also changes your search results based on your Google login and previous searches you’ve completed) and I search “new orleans tutor”, the following happens.
- Google Local results: #3, behind The Princeton Review and The Tutoring Center.
- Google search results: #11, first on the 2nd page.
I am very pleased with my progress: pretty good for someone with very few resources for advertising and absolutely no resources to hire SEO consultants, marketing consultants, PR folks, etc. It’s all come from hours of dedicated hard work, research, and old fashioned linking, etc.
One problem: I commented on a number of WordPress blogs with links to my site. I was always relevant, but someone must have marked a comment of mine as spam. Now Akismet is blocking all of my comments as spam on any WordPress blog, including my own! I have contacted Automattic to no avail so far. I will have to work on that.
Food for thought: Google and other search engines give users credit for both relevant links to users’ own sites and for relevant links to other sites. I am going to go against the normal spirit of competition here and link to some other private tutors in the New Orleans area that I have found online. I am curious to see if that has any effect on my search results and/or theirs. Regardless, it will help individuals combat overkill from agencies, large corporations, and sites like Wyzant (which takes 60% of your hourly fee!).
New Orleans Independent Tutors:
Actually, those are the only three competitors I can find from a basic search. If you are a local private, independent tutor and want to be linked here, contact me.
Tags: google local, google local rank, google rank, independent tutors, new orleans tutor, new orleans tutoring, pagerank, seo | 4 Comments »
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I work for WyzAnt and I would like to correct your comment about our fee structure. Simply put, new tutors in the WyzAnt network earn 60% of their chosen hourly rate (not 40%) and more experienced tutors earn up to 80%. The balance of the hourly fee is devoted to things like student discounts, marketing efforts, and customer service and technology expenses.
I hope this helps clarify things a bit.
This will be a perfect case in point for me in a later post about commercial tutoring websites: Wyzant hires people to correct comments about it on websites. I certainly understand that practice from a business perspective. But is it a good use of a tutor’s 40%? Perhaps it makes it easier for individual tutors to find clients–although this hasn’t been true in my personal experience. Moreover, it artificially increases the rates tutors must charge to earn a reasonable fee. Overall, Wyzant and similar sites are a bad deal for tutors in that they create an online tutoring hegemony by supporting advertising and SEO options that drive all traffic to the tutoring sites while increasing the cost of doing business all around. And when you calculate the fees, it’s hard to make a decent buck on Wyzant. Say you charge $40 an hour–reasonable in most markets, low in others. $40 x 60% = $24, which is pretty low. Now you must pay taxed on the $24 at your local and state levels at a rate usually around 25% (self-employed individuals pay more tax than those working for corporations because the corporations pay half your taxes for you). Keep in mind that all of these sites report your income to the government, so there is no fudging it. $24 x 75% = $18. That’s pretty crummy, especially for the education level of many tutors. If you happened to work full-time at that rate (40 hours a week, which would require about 50-60 hours of actual work) you would only be earning $36,000 a year, with no benefits. You might as well get a job at Starbuck’s at that rate.
Yeah, you tell them joe schmoes at the big corporations, buddy!
Excellent post. Your strategies have helped me a lot in my rankings.