The client

Our client works in asbestos removals, providing a comprehensive service which includes everything from an initial survey and testing all the way to complete removal and disposal. While they are based in Colchester and operate across large parts of Essex, they made it clear that they wanted to work across the region covering areas such as Kent and London.

Goals and objectives

Our client needed help to launch a new and improved website within a fortnight of our initial meeting. As soon as it went live, they wanted to start getting enquiries to increase their workload and allow them to quickly grow. We proposed a plan to enable us to fast-track the launch of the website, then employ a number of tactics to increase the number of enquiries our client would receive through Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click.

We designed our strategy around the clients’ needs, which were to gain an online presence and be open for enquiries as soon as possible. This involved prioritising some parts of our campaign and making the decision to put others on hold for a while until we had things up and running.

Design

The design of the website was the first task we undertook, making sure to create an engaging, visually appealing yet practical layout. By using our customisable starter theme, Lark, we were able to quickly launch the website but without any compromises on the look and feel or structure. The client was much happier with the new and refreshed version of his website and gave us the go-ahead to push it to live and begin the campaign.

Keyword research

As soon as the website went live we turned our attention to keyword research and getting the website to rank for important search terms. As with all of our clients, we undertook comprehensive keyword research relating to our client’s business and services.

In this scenario, the keyword research we performed was especially important because the client wanted us to set up a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. Getting keyword terms exactly right is very important in PPC campaigns as minor differences in how something is phrased can hugely affect the visibility and results of a campaign. You can quickly waste your budget if you aren’t selecting the right keywords.

SEO & PPC

Using our keyword research, we began our marketing campaigns that would be the main driving force behind drawing in enquiries and sales for our client. PPC provides faster results in regards to immediate visibility, so that’s what we initially placed more of a focus on.

We started the paid advertisements immediately because the sooner they’re up and running, the more chance they have of being seen. It wasn’t long before the first few enquiries started to trickle in, and as they did we continued to closely monitor the keywords we had used in our advertisements to see how well they were performing and if they needed changing. As our client wanted us to focus on Essex and London, we knew there would be a higher level of competition. This meant that we had to tailor, target, monitor and tweak our campaign for this area. This would allow us to tap into the stream of business that our client was after.

To supplement this, we began working our SEO work by adding content to the main service pages and producing blog posts and location pages. Location pages were at the forefront of our SEO strategy as they are effective at anchoring a company in a location and letting your customers know where you operate. Like all SEO work, the location pages would take some time to be indexed by Google, so it was important for us to get them published quickly.

The Results

Since the campaign started at the beginning of the year, our client quickly began to receive enquiries. We could see that the PPC ads were working as the users on our website had come directly from the paid advertisements. However, we experienced one week where the number of enquiries dropped significantly. This was due to lockdown rules easing and more companies returning to work, therefore increasing the competition and number of ads we were up against.

After this happened, we made some changes to the keywords, timing and the layout of our paid advertisements. The impact was immediate, and for a while, our client was receiving at least one enquiry every day. This continued until our client realised the workload was becoming too much and had to hire another member of staff to help him and rent an office space to work out of.

In the month of July, our client had 388 new users visit their website. Out of these 388 visitors, 295 of them came from paid search, which is a staggering 74.5%. 11.9% of the remaining visitors came from organic search, with the rest either being referred or searching for our client directly.

Where do we go from here?

We can see that our primary focus, which was paid advertising, has been successful. It’s encouraging to see that organic search is contributing to the new users, and as we continue to implement our SEO work we hope to see this contribution grow.

We are still in the early days of our work when it comes to SEO as this is a much more long-term strategy. However, our dual approach has achieved the main objective and the money invested in our work is yielding a high return.

We still have plenty of work to do when it comes to SEO. By bulking out the rest of the website, improving internal linking and obtaining external site authority, we will improve the organic ranking of the website. As the organic results gradually improve we can start to reduce the focus on the PPC campaign and therefore maximise our client’s budget.

As the world of digital marketing is forever changing, we aren’t sure what might come up next – we began this campaign in the first week of March and the website went live right before lockdown.

We’ve been carefully monitoring the results on a weekly or even daily basis at times and we’ll be keeping this up for any updates which could affect our client and their business. We’re already thinking about Web Vitals for next year, but thanks to our bespoke and customisable WordPress theme that already has so much built into it, we’re already a step ahead.