Page 51 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

Test Results: September 11, 2020

The GMB website was ranking in the top 100 for terms that normally didn’t perform well on the
standard organic website. These especially correlated to partial match keyword brands and exact
match keyword brands, but still seemed to hold some weight with on-page optimization as well.

The 2 things to note are:

1) Before putting content on the site, it ranked better than previously. We did use some poor
quality duplicate content for this site specifically, which leads us to believe that is what happened
with this example.

2) However, the UTM URL did rank better than the root URL, which is another weird occurrence
we have no real data on. We believe the UTM is what indexed, due to it being used on the
verified GMB listing.

We also saw some power behind the rankings for certain GMB websites, hosted on subdomains
on business.site. There was a possibility that if we leverage enough prominence signals we may
get to show in maps and organic with very little effort.

Update: September 18, 2020

At this time, the results didn’t look good, but we believe there were two reasons. First, the listing
had very little optimization. It’s just a GMB site that was put up for a new GMB listing that also had
no optimization. Second, we added content to the site but didn't optimize it well.

We believe Google picked up the new content and considered it in the organic rankings when
the page re-indexed under the root URL vs the UTM URL. There was a clear shift in ranking when
the URL switched. We don't believe it was the UTM URL that necessarily ranked better than the
root.

51