SEO Case Study - Month One

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SEO Case Study - Month One

Added Tuesday 08/07/2008

I have been itching to showcase an SEO campaign for a while. Up until now none of the campaigns we manage seemed appropriate. That was then, this is now. Let me introduce Reflex Office Solutions.

I have chosen this client as it seemed to me to be the perfect case study. They currently have very little search engine presence for their chosen keywords so we can therefore accurately measure the improvements from each action undertaken.

Reflex Solutions offer serviced office space in and around London and Soho They are competing in the same market as some big players such (i think everyone has heard of Regus) yet their offering is unique in that they offer flexible licenses in non-branded, Victorian style buildings.

So let's see how we fair against the big boys from what is effectively a standing start....if this were Gladiators we would definitely be going on the second whistle.

After some in-depth keyword analysis we selected around 8 niche keywords appropriate to the organisation:

Managed Offices London
Managed Offices Soho
London Serviced Offices
Serviced Office London
Serviced Office North London
Office Space London Central
Flexible Office Space London
Flexible offices London

Whilst these keywords do not carry the largest volumes of traffic they are certainly busy enough to make a substantial difference to the amount of visitors to the site. Reflex Solutions is quite specific in the areas of London that it services. This means we can also be quite specific with the geo-targeting of the keywords i.e. London, Soho, North London

Unfortunately no one seemed to be searching on "Victorian style offices", so absolutely no point going after that no matter how suitable it may seem!

The first change we made to the website itself was to transfer the primary domain to the .co.uk extension (www.reflexsolutions.co.uk). This domain still had good age and since the services are specific to the UK it seemed sensible to target google.co.uk (the site is currently hosted on Amazon Servers in the states meaning that the TLD is what Google reads next in order to identify a location). Since the website currently has only one inbound link this was a quite an easy decision to make. Although we still did a 301 redirect so the Search Engines know that this is a permanent redirect.

Next we moved to the on-site changes. The website itself was quite small with few areas of decent content. We therefore created pages specific to the chosen keywords with the relevant offices listed underneath i.e. Managed Offices Soho, Flexible Offices London etc. We gave each listings page individual introductions and ensured that only relevant offices are listed in each one.

So as not to disturb the existing site navigation too much we simply added links to these pages in the footer/sitemap of the site. This is certainly not ideal for aesthetics and may well be a bit link heavy but at this stage it will do until Google has fully indexed the site. Once this happens it is likely that we will embed the links throughout the site or develop the office listings page further. Indeed once the off-site SEO takes hold we may be able to remove them completely.

The next step we took was to bulk up the content in other areas of the site, and we will be soon introducing a news/blog channel. The site only had around 40 pages of content and we have immediately doubled that. The new channel will also ensure the content is a bit more dynamic, tempting the spiders to visit more often. While I am pretty certain that discussing the details of "Office Space London Central" is not everyone's cup of tea but it is still content. It may be an old adage that is used a lot, but it doesn't make it any less true.....Content is King!

While we were there we updated all meta titles and descriptions so that the search results look nice and pretty for all potential visitors. The meta title does still play an important role in indexing so we spent a lot of time ensuring that it is relevant to the page content below it and helps the user experience by having a consistent format throughout the site.

The format we went for was:
"Main Keyword" | Location| "Company Name + Alternative Descriptor"
Serviced Offices | London | Reflex Managed Office Solutions

We also tidied up the Header Tags throughout the site. Header Tags are one of the only times you can tell the SE's what's important and what's not, so use them wisely.

Once all the on-site changes were made (for now) we submitted the sitemap to the major search engines using the webmaster tools available. According to Google we just missed Googlebot on the 1st July so its just a question of time before it comes knocking again, although it may well be some time yet as the site content had not been updated in months and months.

Once the website has been indexed we will be able to bench mark how successful the on-site changes have been and move onto the off-site work. In fact, I may just have started already!