(MKTG 348) Week 2 - SEO Rank Check

This weeks assignment was to see how different websites ranked based on a keyword search. This was a very interesting activity because customers who are searching for a new product will most likely search for a keyword instead of a particular brand or company name. I know that when I am looking for a new item, for example an iPhone case, I look up 'phone case' in google and click on the first few results. So it is clearly important that a company's website has a high rank on search results or it may not get viewed.
The exercise we worked on in class allowed the class to test different websites' rankings based on a keyword search. Our professor provided us with a website where we could type in a website address and then compare it to another website address. The sample sites we looked up were www.rgbexchange.org and npoex.strikingly.com and the keyword we searched was 'non profit stock exchange'. After you submit the two sites and the keyword this is the results you would see:

As you can see both of the websites are not ranked under the keyword search 'non profit stock exchange'. This means that when you Google search that particular key word these websites will not show up. The image above also shows whether or not the link appears on Bing or Yahoo! As an experiment I tried modifying the key word using the same sites to see if I could get different results. I modified the keyword from 'non profit stock exchange' to ' non profit stock' and these are the results I obtained:

Using this new keyword I was able to find the npoex.strinkingly.com website as the eighth result on Bing. It was interesting to see that with a slight modification to a keyword a website can go from not even being ranked to being placed as the eight link. Just to double check this finding I performed a Bing search using the keyword 'non profit stock'. Once I performed this search I found that npoex.strikingly.com did in fact come up as the eighth link on Bing. Picking the right key word can really make a difference in whether or not a website is ranked.