One of the best ways to show your expertise in any subject area (mine being Search Engine Marketing / and Social Media Optimisation) is a case study, showing how you were presented with a 'problem' what you did to fix it and what the results were.
In this case, Serendipity Online Marketing was contacted by Shire and Co after a referral by a current client. We went along and laid down what we could do for them, saying that it we would expect to be able to get them onto page one of Google for a number of top phrases in about 3 months, this being an especially difficult task as the site was very new.
We laid out a plan, our tried and tested plan, first doing the keyword research, then altering the site to include these words, then constructing a solid set of links to the site.
We were thus faced with the fact that we had a very new site, that was not built that well (the use of Joomla being a bit odd in places), that wanted rankings in a fairly competitive area. To cap it all, they wanted results fast!
When we started the site had no rankings for anything much (other than its own name) few links, and was totally unoptimised. It did not even cover all the areas that the customer wanted and which had been picked from the keyword research. Whilst it is not unusual to find that all the keyword phrases were not covered, it was unusual to find that some areas were not covered. But this was not a problem for Serendipity.
What we did.
As we knew what keywords were wanted, we started optimising the site, adding pages to cover the areas required and changing all the others so that they had the best chance of getting those all important rankings. We also added the iJoomla SEO extension to the site to make the process more efficient.
To cover the all important area of Social Media and Signal, we started a Twitter account and built the number of followers up to just under 400 in just a few weeks. Besides Tweeting from this account, we also Tweeted from our own accounts (which have nearly 8,000 followers in all) about Shire.
We also started the linking programme. As the graph below shows there were very few links to start with:-
The number of links took off under our influence leaping up to nearly 800 in just 2 months (with a lot more in process at the time of writing).
To show that this is not a one off, we also did some some work for a sister company of Shire and Co, Shire Leasing. As the graph below shows, when Serendipity started creating links in August, the numbers just took off...
But back to Shire and Co. So what was the result of our labours, what was acheived?
The Results
Being an SEO company, we were going to be judged on the number of rankings we gained for coverted words like 'Business Lawyers', 'Company Lawyers' and 'Employment Lawyers'.
As already stated, the rankings on Google for these words was a big fat ZERO before we started, the site had NO rankings at all. But after just two months, the rankings had started to appear and after three we had acheived:-
- Business Lawyers - Position 3 out of over 6 Million pages
- Company Lawyers - Position 1 out of over 36 Million pages
- Employment Lawyers - Position 10 out of 1.5 Million pages
Of course it was early days, there being a lot more work to do for the site to get it even better rankings, traffic and enquiries. However, that was not to be, an internal re-organisation of the Shire Group causing them to take all SEO works back in house. Whilst this was a shame, at least we at Serendipity had given them a sound base to work from.
So there you have it, faced with the problem of a site with no links, rankings and little traffic, we did the research, made the on page changes and created the links, in the end producing some very good rankings for some top keywords.
More on SEO next week
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