Interesting - what type(s) of queries saw the lift? (head vs long tail, geotargeted vs local intent vs generic, competitiveness, intent - transactional vs informational vs navigational ...) and did you leapfrog certain sites or did a bunch of sites above you drop? Just trying to get a better idea of the whole picture!
As it's a local Japanese business, I have no idea what long tail would be considered as 3 characters could translate roughly to a 5 word sentence. The site is set to geotarget Japan / Japanese only. It is a blog on the content management system WordPress serving informational and navigational information in the form of what is going on in the industry, how people can keep ahead of the game, etc. as well as providing guidance in ways of achieving what potential clients would want. Initially we began with 1 or 2 posts a month for a couple months as it was a side project and now we're up to 1 to 2 posts a week with quality information of what's going on in Japanese news.
As far as the industry is, it's very competitive. Though, nobody but the big players can get on page 1, while all the small businesses (mom and pop type) don't even have their own website (which I'm working on which sounds counter-productive, but at least they have a shot to compete now), and if they do, it's hosted on the WordPress.com/Blogspot of this region of Japan.
Other sites that I would consider authoritive with their 7-8$ corporations held their position, maybe a +1/-1 as usual. Except of course mine knocking some down a peg. (Analyzed sites I beat and it was after I tricked out what Google suggested of Page Speed, which could be another factor.)
I also have to wonder if you were seeing Pigeon (local search algo update) - especially if it was an across-the-board change. Pigeon began rolling out 7/24 and was shaking things around for a LONG time after that....Pigeon integrated more "traditional" search factors into local result rankings so there were some significant changes for many.
Since the competitiveness in this niche is so high (local vendors); even being in a small localized area, I don't think going live with minimal updates starting late December 2013 attributed for a spike from low page 2 (~18) to mid page 1 in a matter of days after https everywhere was publicized to give a "lightweight boost" to websites that implement SSL.
It has to be coincidental that adding a certificate did it alone, but Pigeon may have gotten the site from page 6 to page 4-2 over that time span. However, I won't throw out Pigeon being attached to the https everywhere update, giving a larger geo boost than normal. Though, it still doesn't account for a low page 2 to mid-page 1 update within a week of that metric being announced and immediately implemented in my opinion.
Or quite possibly all in a span of that one month prior, I conformed to Page Speed 100% (besides being hit for Google Analytics
as well as sometimes above-the-fold render blocking JavaScript and CSS), added authorship, refined Schema and proceeded to enable https around August 10th.
Yeah, I was wishing I was in the SSL cert business around that time
. Shows you the power they have - they say "jump", everybody scrambles.
It was nice that GoDaddy had a certificate promo after that (or I just noticed it because I never really cared before August 6th), dropping a $70 cert to I believe around $40. As I had the funds, it was worth a shot to test what "lightweight" meant to them. The certificate has paid for itself time and time again.
Maybe next time they say lightweight, I may jump on it much sooner than 4 days later (and quite possibly had been a dollar short) as local developing companies don't understand the algorithm updates for months despite the Google Japan Hangouts they air on YouTube from time to time. Similar to when a movie comes to theaters in America, it's released months later here.
I suppose when speaking development, that's good for me though as I did sell quite a bit of SSL certs and installed them.
