Case Study
Design and Product
Why Nationwide search brings in the Business
Design and Product are an award winning product design
agency, with a creative team of professional designers and
engineers.
CEO Martyn approached me through a recommendation in his office block, and was curious to know how I could help with his enquiry funnel, and also bring in additional targeted business through his website.
How did we start?
Like every digital marketer should, we started with discovery. We investigated what work had already taken place and what the end goal was for the campaign. Martyn had already used other SEO companies before and whilst he had seen some results, was curious to know if more could be done.
We also identified some spammy links created when the site had been hacked in 2015.
Let’s dive into what’s Important
Using tools, like Screaming Frog , Ahrefs, and Siteliner, we did a deep crawl analysis of the website to identify any duplicate content, titles, pages and unwanted mentions or links.
After, manually checking every page on the site, we recommend a fresh approach to the structure, linking and titles of the site and immediately identified some quick wins, such as the “Contact page” competing with the Homepage, and his overall site being dragged down through over optimisation.
Conducting a link audit showed a huge imbalance of domain vs link ratio, and a large percentage of authority coming from directory listings. Luckily, the spammy links we found were not pointing to actual pages on the site.
Let’s dive into what’s Important
Now, most of you might be thinking that quick rankings sound alarm bells for blackhat techniques. But, these techniques that I am sharing below, show how massively important site architecture is for winning first page rankings.
De- Optimising Pages,
Wait!, De-optimising pages? I thought you were meant to optimise everything!
Sure, maybe a decade a go you could add your keywords across your whole site and force your way to the top, but things have changed and so has Google’s algorithm. I started by manually looking at all of the sites pages, and making decisions on what pages should be found in the search results for our main keyphrases, and removing titles and headers on pages that we don’t want google to think are our prime pages. This allowed me to create a site structure where our informational pages support our main services and give the site more overall search strength.
Link Balancing
During our research, we had already found an imbalance of links, so adding fresh contextual links is always a good shout in the first stages of SEO. We started looking for relevant topics that we could write about, which would be a perfect fit for PR, Industry specific and social links to the site.
This achieved us first page and top three positions for:
- Product Design Company
- Product Design Consultants – Product Design Brighton
Martyn, was happy with the movements is the search results and wanted to take it a step further and promote the fact he specialise in plastics. Using the “site structure” tactics above we managed to achieve page one results for his “Plastic Design” Landing page.
Keyphrases
- Plastic Design Consultants – Plastic Design Company
- Plastic Design Brighton
