You have a website and it is ranking for a target phrase on your homepage but you want to change it. And that brings up the 64 dollar question:

How long will it take Google to reconfigure your target phrase?

Web Design Workplace  was #1 and #2 for the phrase “NJ web design” for 6 months and we changed our homepage completely yesterday.We are switching our homepage target phrase to “affordable web design” now. It’s got lots of competition from some players that have been entrenched on the first page for a very long time – years in fact. But we decided we had to get out of the “NJ web design consultant” competition becasue we were not getting the number of clients we wanted. We were also shifting the business from doing a lot of higher end SEO jobs to making lots of affordable webs instead.

So look who took over 12 hours after we rolled out the new homepage, a guy who has multiple websites for the same company and gets away with it all the time somehow. The #1 and #2 now are the guy who black hats Google and seems to get away with it. What is a black hat? A person who is bad and uses tricks and cheats to get more clicks. The #3 guy now (Barry Wise) is a great guy and a real SEO pro. So at least we know Google is telling us it knows we changed our target phrase. We got moved to positions #5 and #7 for a phrase we dominated until we cut over the new content and look and feel for our site. Now begins the long march for the new target phrase…

We just answered the first part of the question… it takes a matter of hours for Google to recognize a big change has occurred and start to reflect those changes in the main index. Wow – it used to take weeks or months but now it was that fast. Part of the reason is that our website has been a solid PR4 for over a year. We are very proud of that. Google spiders sites that have higher page rank more often so we expected they would find out soon that we did the big change.

How Long Till We Start to Rank for the New Target Phrase?

We are not in the top 500 yet after 12 hours. That is expected. If I had to bet on this one, I would say we will enter the index for our new target phrase somewhere between 51 and 550 over the next week. And if we blog a lot and get more new links we can move up to the 40′s within a month. But this is what we do for a living here and I can tell you it is so much fun we are laughing our butts off and having a great time. From the armchair we can only guess. Top 40 within a month, top 10 within 2 months. That’s my guess. If we are very lucky and work hard, we might be able to get on the first page (Top 10 results) for our new phrase withing a month.

Where are the Rules For Switching a Target Phrase?

Year ago we thought the black hat game was the fun one and we found over time there was a lot more reward playing by the white hat rules.  If you want to know where those white hat rules are… look no further than Google WebMaster Central. The guy who uses multiple sites to try to get more clicks is a looser. He’s a cheater. Sure he is gaming the Google system now… you can see for yourself by looking at the sites. But in the long run Professional SEO’s like our team and the hundreds of SEO’s we know all frown on the black hatters for being non-professionals. We will keep you posted as to our progress on the new phrase!! Cheers everyone !!