A big part of the relaunch of the Kyle Bunch personal brand experience™ here at kylebunch.com was the never-ending quest for Googlejuice. After months of forsaking my blogging efforts at kylebunch.org, kb.com was intended to serve as a reboot that would help bolster my standing in search rankings in all of the key areas that I hoped to have some clout, from business, marketing, design and technology to sports, movies, music, humor and food.
But alas, good intentions in a post-GOOG world will only get you so far. Once I got all of my old kylebunch.org content mothballed and moved to kylebunch.com/vintage and I launched the new kylebunch.com you’re staring at now (assuming you’re not reading this in a feedreader or splog), the business of bolstering my search rankings began.
So, like an experenced digital marketing veteran, I called in the experts. Fortunately for me, the “experts” just happen to be a company I am a partner in, SEOintelligence.
SEOintelligence was founded by my good friend Jeremy Hermanns, a search marketing veteran who runs a successful search marketing services company — SimpleSEM — while also working with major companies to build their internal search marketing disciplines. In short, the guy is a white hat search marketing samurai, and the perfect person to build easy-to-use, powerful tools that give the average marketer, agency, or webmaster (do they still use that term?) all of the insights that the professionals charge (and usually OVER charge) for.
Fortunately for me, while Jeremy is an encyclopedia of search marketing knowledge, he’s not quite as experienced when it comes to the realms of user experience and visual design. That’s how I got the opportunity to become a partner in SEOintelligence (a more thorough case study of the SEOi development experience will follow soon).
After spending months working with Jeremy and a development team to build out this rich set of search marketing tools, the launch of kylebunch.com seemed like the perfect opportunity to give the full quiver of tools a shot.
Step 1: Taking an SEOiQ Test
One of the coolest pieces of the SEOintelligence suite is the SEOiQ test, a quickie diagnostic examination that compares your site to up to three competitors. And for a new SEOi user, the SEOiQ test is the perfect place to start. It’s overview of your site’s key stats makes it easy to identify how you stack up against other sites in everything ranging from PageRank to Google/Yahoo/MSN backlinks to links from other traffic/authority sources like Wikipedia, Digg and Mahalo.
Here’s a quick screen capture of the top level diagnostic (one of the four main components of the SEOiQ test results) from kylebunch.com’s first SEOiQ test:
As you can see from the screenshot above, kylebunch.com needs some help. The algorithmic SEOiQ score isn’t a golf game — it’s modeled off real iQ. Which means, right now kylebunch.com would be considered legally retarded, in matters of search performance.
To be fair, a lot of this has to do with the lack of a PageRank — something to be expected with a new URL such as kylebunch.com. Add to that the fact that — even though I moved kylebunch.org content to kylebunch.com using a proper 301 redirect — a lot of the 4 years worth of blog content that I built up at kb.org isn’t registering as part of the indexed content by Google and Yahoo, and it’s not shocking that the site isn’t an SEOiQ genius just yet.
That being said, the low score provides plenty of room for improvement — something I will continue to chronicle here with regular updates, showcasing how SEOintelligence can help take a brand new site and turn it into a top performer in the search results (or SERPs, as Jeremy would say).
To be continued…
