Our client and their objective
Established in 1991, our client is a long-standing company that provides professional signage and large-format printing services. Based just outside of Colchester, our client is well-positioned to reach a large target market across Essex and Suffolk.
Due to their longevity and experience of their trade, our client felt like they were one of the best sign printing companies in the county. What they needed was to broadcast this message online and increase the traffic and enquiries from their website.
Keyword research
The first step to any successful digital marketing campaign is to conduct keyword research. But keyword research isn’t always a straightforward thing to do. With every client, you’ve got to take into consideration what their goal is and how keywords can help to achieve it.
In this scenario, our client is a small business providing business to small-to-medium-sized enterprises as well as providing B2C services. Our client’s main focus would be on getting enquiries from local customers, so this is something that we implemented into our keyword research. For example, instead of aiming too broadly at ‘sign printing in Essex’, we went into more detail to uncover keywords with a decent search volume with a low difficulty score.
Competitor research
Competitor research is always an important part of marketing campaigns as not only do they allow you to see how you compare to other businesses, they also give you ideas about new strategies you can use. If a competitor is employing a particular strategy which is providing them with great results, then it would make sense for us to mimic that strategy for our client.
Through our competitor research, we were able to see which keywords our competitors were likely to be focusing on and if any of them would apply to us too. We also observed the layout of their websites, the categories they listed and how they described their services. All of these aspects are useful in terms of optimising a website and the contents it presents.
What we enjoyed doing
One type of content which we enjoyed producing was along the lines of ‘The Importance of Banners in Marketing’ and ‘The Importance of Signs in Marketing’. This is because there are parallels to be drawn here between the physical marketing our client produces, and the virtual marketing that we produce for our clients.
Some of the statistics we found while researching this topic were really interesting. For example, a study in 2016 showed that 35% of shoppers in the UK made impulse purchases. This shows that people will always be willing to spend money they didn’t plan to, meaning that those who work in marketing will always have the opportunity to persuade consumers to purchase.
Strategy
After we’d carried out the necessary preliminary research, we began our strategy of helping our client to boost their digital presence. A major part of this strategy was what’s known as On-Page SEO, which is producing content for pages of the website.
We focused on producing location pages as they are crucial for ranking for local search terms which were what we focused on in our keyword research. By uploading detailed pages that target specific locations and what services can be offered to those, we increased our client’s chances of ranking on search engines for those search terms.
As well as location pages, we worked on our client’s blog section and consistently uploaded blogs, guides and articles to their website. Regularly posting blogs and updating your website is a good way to show search engines that your website is staying up-to-date and relevant. Blogs also allow you to keep hitting those all-important keywords, which is another incentive to stay active in your news section.
In time, we also made changes to the website introducing small tweaks that would make a difference. These covered areas such as page speed as well as layout. We undertook heatmap analysis to see where customers might find frustrations with the website and then set out to resolve these. While we didn’t build the website, we were able to still work with the code and design to introduce these changes.
Results
Our results show themselves predominantly in the improvements to keyword rankings which we tracked for our client as well as the number of enquiries they received. We boosted the rankings by targeting our priority keywords in metadata, location pages and blog posts.
As of writing this post, our client now ranks in first place for a number of search terms, all of which include a service they offer and a location near where they are based. Overall, they rank for forty-three keywords in the top ten positions on Google. This means that they appear on the first page of Google for all of those search terms, which will massively increase our client’s visibility and chances of attracting traffic.
Never-ending changes
SEO is a practice which never comes to an end. Because of how many times Google updates its algorithms (over 260 every day), the world of SEO is constantly changing. Part of our service is staying up to date with these changes and making sure we continue to optimise our client’s websites and content to the highest possible standards.