Mohd Elfie Nieshaem JuferiSeveral months ago, a colleague of mine unintentionally ranked the word eddificent for a client’s landing page (she has no background in SEO) in the Google SERP. That would have been all well and good, were not for the fact that the word itself is non-existent in the English dictionary; it was the only website that ranked in the whole wide world for this particular keyword.
Once I realized that this word had never been indexed by Google before, I decided to take advantage of the situation by turning it into a control keyword. This is useful for me to detect if the page I want to rank for is being affected by any algorithm updates or other SEO factors. By monitoring the ranking of “eddificent” — a unique and previously unranked term — I could easily determine if changes in the website’s visibility were due to external influences or the inherent qualities of the site itself.
To implement this, I began by incorporating “eddificent” across various web properties that I own: the metadata, alt tags of images, and even within the content itself, albeit sparingly to avoid any negative impact on user experience. I also created a few backlinks with “eddificent” as the anchor text from other domains to give it a slight push in the rankings.
It’s So Eddificently Eddificent!
Over the following weeks, I monitored the rankings closely. Initially, there was little movement, but gradually “eddificent” started to climb up the search results. It was a slow process, but it provided valuable insights. Whenever there was a significant jump or drop in the rankings of “eddificent”, I compared it with the performance of other primary keywords. This comparison often indicated whether the change was a result of a broader Google algorithm update or something specific to the website, like a technical issue or a change in content quality.
The SERP Today
This is how the current SERP looks like today and I have no doubt that it will change again when this blog post gets indexed.
Interestingly, this experiment also had an unexpected side effect. As “eddificent” began to rank, it started attracting a small but noticeable amount of traffic to the site. Curious visitors, perhaps intrigued by the uniqueness of the word, clicked through to see what it was all about. This provided an additional data point to analyse user behavior and engagement on the site.
In Conclusion
The accidental ranking of “eddificent” turned into a strategic tool for SEO analysis. It helped me understand the nuances of search engine algorithms and how different factors could influence the visibility of a website. It was a reminder of the often-overlooked fact that sometimes, the most unconventional methods can yield the most interesting results in the world of digital marketing.