Getting a specialty service page found by the search engines
I recently discovered that my pages have vanished from the top couple of pages for searches for résumé writing in my local area.
From 1985 to 1995, résumé writing for local clients was the biggest chunk of my business. At this point, it’s a very small percentage of what I do—my focus is far more on marketing consulting and copywriting for authors, publishers, and small businesses (especially those with green products and services).
But even though it’s a tiny fraction of my business, it’s work that I enjoy and am good at, and for local clients, it provides me with some human contact that I don’t get through a lot of my other work. And I do want to be found if people are looking.
For years, Google has brought me an occasional résumé client. I hadn’t noticed any drop off, but the résumé portion is such a small part of the operation these days, that it’s hard to measure real drops.
So, in December, I made a special page, just for resume writing in Western Massachusetts, and crammed it full of place names for cities, towns, and counties around here. And added Like buttons for Google+ and Facebook.
Google is known to “sandbox” new pages: to let them sit outside the index for a while until they determine the page to be legitimate. And a page with this many keywords may be particularly at risk.
You can participate in this experiment at https://www.accuratewriting.com/wmass_resumes.shtml. Please click the two buttons; let’s see how long it takes for Google to notice. I will report back the results, whatever happens.
So far, in the three months since the page went up, Google has sent me one résumé client. I think the page is still in the sandbox. However, if you beleive in the Law of Attraction, here’s some validation: I’ve had a noticeable uptick in résumé work generally, but from other sources.
