Big Surf Digital

Keyword research:

The great thing about taking on a client that has been online for years is the data available. With The Sgurr Energy site we had Analytics data which allowed us to see which keywords were currently bringing in traffic.

We extracted a few hundred of these keywords then found out the following data for each:

Ranking positions in Google UK and US.
Monthly search amounts in both countries.
Close variants and similar terms plus data above for each.
Keyword suggestions from client.
This gave us over 250 keywords to optimise. With a number of big traffic search terms it was a case of increasing the ranking from a position within the top ten to the number 1 or 2 steps. With many other keywords we were starting from outside the top 100 listings.

On-page optimisation:

Link building:

We carried out an audit on the current link profile and looked at where we could possibly tweak specific links if we had control over them. We also carried out a lot of competitor link analysis. Reviewing links which were pointing at competitors' sites allowed us to see where it might be possible to secure new links for the site.We carried out on-page optimisation for every important target page, where we edited the Meta title and description, page text, headers and internal linking. Once all of the pages were resubmitted to Google and indexed we saw a jump in traffic.

Reporting:

We created comprehensive monthly reports that included historical traffic data broken down by traffic source with bounce and conversion rates for each. We tracked over 300 keywords every month over the length of the campaign which allowed us and the client to view ranking progress as well as monitor any drops. If something goes wrong with a site or changes are made this data is very useful in figuring out what happened. We also included conversions in the reports segmented by traffic source. Conversions are always the end goal in any campaign so this helped us track progress and allowed the client to work out how much of a return on investment their SEO spend was generating.

Problems encountered:

No campaign is without its problems. We had to navigate the sites rankings through two website redesigns but were able to have a lot of input into the content and structure of each, meaning we were able to increase traffic on the first occasion. On the second traffic dipped by about 1000 but there were some redundant pages that were being removed.