Search Engine Optimisation Case Study

April 9th, 2010 | by Peter Cullen |

Below is a short SEO case study.

Nearly three months ago, Josh Ward from Josh Ward Garden Design won a competition with Interleado for 6 months free subscription to the SEO Workbench and 6 hours of free mentoring.

Since he won the competition Josh and Interleado have reviewed his online business and we wanted to share the process that we went through and the results of the search engine optimisation tasks that we worked on.

During our first conversation Josh explained that Google local search was a strategic part of his online marketing plan as some of his keywords had a geographical focus , e.g. London garden designer.

So we first looked at his Google Local Business center profile and we looked at his competitors to see what profile they had and also what local business listings they had. From this bit of research changes were made and new links sought.

The results below were taken from a search of Google.co.uk, Search the web

Local Search Results for London garden designer

You can see that Josh’s website is ranked highly in Google’s local search results for his keyword, ‘London garden designer’.

So can you achieve results like these for your local search results? We’ve posted two blogs recently on this area;

After we finished with Google Local Search, we then turned our attention to the main website, www.joshwardgardendesign.com.

As part of our initial website audit we ran a full SEO Workbench report against the website to benchmark the following key performance areas:

Where Josh’s initial keywords the right ones to optimise for?
How well optimised was the content?
How much authority had the website got and where was it coming from
How visible was the website – how well ranked was it for its keywords
How well optimised were its keywords competitors
Where was his competitors getting their backlinks from?

What did the first report tell us?

Keyword Research

The foundation of any online marketing project and one that is frequently overlooked when putting a website together for the first time. In terms of keywords we did some further keyword research to find out what additional keywords we should be focusing on. We used two keyword research tools, Google Keywords Tool and the keyword research tool embedded in the SEO Workbench. So how did we actually do the keywords research?
Content Analysis

When the SEO Workbench crawls a website it brings back the content from each page, strips down the text to get rid of stop words, words like, it, and, the, but, is, an…etc. It then scores the remaining text against the set of keywords the user has initially entered. In this case the Content Score was 13.26%, so the content on the website was poorly optimised.

What factors are included in the assessing the content score?

i) Internal Links
ii) External Links
iii) Keywords in Domain Name
iv) Keywords in URL’s

v) Title Tag
vi) Description Tag
vii) Keywords Tag
viii) H1 Tag
ix) H2-h6 Tag
x) Bullets
xi) Comments in code

Some of these factors are very important and require careful analysis (internal links, title tag), and some require little analysis and are of less value (keywords tag, comments in code).

The SEO Workbench does not yet analyse all SEO factors, so additional factors that we would have looked at included:

- image analysis
- sitemap analysis – both xml and html
- W3C coding standards
- Blog integration
- Content Syndication Strategy
- Call to Action Analysis – more usability than SEO but important part of content analysis
Website Authority Analysis

Here the SEO Workbench looks at the backlinks for a website and performs an analysis of those backlinks to determine how valuable they are. Value is determined by analysis of the following factors:-

- how much authority (Page Rank) each backlink has
- what link text is in the backlink
- what context is the back link from, i.e. is it on topic?
- whether the link is ‘follow’ or ‘nofollow’
- what country the backlink comes from

The SEO Workbench gives an initial backlink profile for a website, a list of all the backlinks and their authority, as shown below.

Website Backlink Profile from SEO Workbench

This is the actual profile from the initial analysis of the Josh Ward website. You can see that the majority of backlinks have little or no authority. This profile is by no means unique, its a very typical profile of backlinks to a website. The challenge is to move the columns to the right so that you start getting backlinks with more authority to your website.
Visibility Analysis

How visible was the website before we started doing any work on it? The visibility score was 0.61% – pretty low, but at least we had a benchmark.

The SEO Workbench shows visibility for Google, Yahoo and Bing for your target country, so in this case as the target country was the UK, Google.co.uk, bing.co.uk (which reverts to http://www.bing.com/?cc=gb )and Yahoo.co.uk (which reverts to http://uk.yahoo.com/) were used. The images below shows some of the initial rankings.

Website Visibility - SEO Workbench
Keyword Competitor Analysis

Who are your competitors online?

Not your traditional competitors from the high street, but your online keyword competitors! It’s a common mistake to think you are competing only against your know competitors online. Often you are up against websites that sometimes have little to do with you in terms of direct competition, but in terms of keyword competition they may be out ranking you in the search engines.

The SEO Workbench queries Google to see who are your top 10 competitors for your top 10 keywords – that’s 100 competitors analysed.

The initial benchmark report for Josh Ward Garden Designs gave the following info for the keyword ‘garden designers London’ :

Keyword Competitors

This diagram shows part of the competitor analysis available in the SEO Workbench. This list shows the keyword competitors for the keyword term ‘garden designers london’.

The inverted funnel shows graphically the amount of traffic a website can expect to gain if they are the positions shown, so for example, the website in position 1, www.mylandscapes.co.uk, would expect to get about 42% of clicks from users who search using this keyword term.

The funnel goes on down to position 10, www.chdesigns.co.uk which gets 3% of clicks.

These competitors are from Google.co.uk and obviously may change from time to time.

If you click on any of these competitors you can get further information, including:

- backlinks of competitors
- pagerank of those backlinks
- follow or no-follow tags
- additional data on the competitors ranked page
Competitor Backlink Analysis A crucial part of building the authority of the Josh Ward Garden Design site was to start building the authority of the website.Our starting place was looking at their competitors backlinks. The SEO Workbench allows you to do this as shown below.
Backlink Analysis Websites

You can see the backlinks listed and the one highlighted is a really high value potential backlink, i.e. with a high Page Rank and set to follow.

So after two months of actively working on his website, what has been the impact of implementing the recommendations from the SEO Workbench?

For one of the keywords we have been focusing on, ‘ garden designers london’, a comparison between February and March shows the following numbers;

Traffic Comparison Numbers

Also, the visibility has started to improve, after only 2 months as shown below:

Rankings Improvement

It’s obviously hard in such a short space of time to get really accurate numbers, so we’ll be watching the traffic stats over the coming months to see how they evolve. However, with the continued focus on optimising the content and building the authority of the website, we’re sure these numbers will continue to grow.

“Working with Interleado and the SEO Workbench mentoring service has increased my own knowledge of what it takes to succeed online.

I am seeing increased visibility and increased leads from my website as part of my work with Interleado”

Josh Ward Garden Design – Leading Contemporary Garden Designers in London

What about your website?

Have you recently done a website audit? How did your website fare?

What are the most important elements of a website audit for you?