How do you make an impression online when your competitors have been in business for decades and yours is a relatively new entrant to the market?
That's the question Geeta Thomas, owner of cloud-based waste management software My Yard Software, was wrestling with. When we'd finished the project, Geeta was saying, "I'm really pleased with the hard work put in by Vitis to get My Yard ranking so highly. Beating long-established competitors in this way is a fantastic achievement."
My Yard was already working with Vitis PR, achieving excellent results with award entries and articles in the trade press, however the My Yard website was only appearing on page three of Google search for the main industry search term and not even in the top 100 for related phrases.
Geeta asked us to help move My Yard Software up the search results; ranking higher in search would help raise My Yard's online profile and ultimately reduce the need to spend on online advertising such as AdWords.
Setting an SEO baseline & SEO audit
The first step in the process was setting a baseline against which improvements could be tracked, this included rankings in search engines and the number of visits to the site (from search).
We conducted a site audit, identifying technical issues and other on-site changes changes that would lead to better search rankings. We also looked at conversion optimisation, adding trust and credibility markers so that visitors would see the great work My Yard had done and excellent coverage in the waste industry press.
Links & tools
Having addressed the on-site issues, we looked at ensuring the setup of google analytics and other tools provided by the search engines, making sure they were correctly configured and that the site was getting the maximum benefit form the information those tools provided.
The final step in the process was link building. We built relevant links to the site to increase its visibility in search results (in building links, we were careful to avoid risky link purchasing or link network schemes to ensure that the site didn't fall foul of the Google Panda or Penguin updates).
Results
Ranking in Google search moved up to position one for the top industry phrase, pushing long-established competitors down the results and the site now appears on page one (most in the top five results) for several other industry terms.
Non-branded organic search traffic growth
Traffic to the site increased by 63% and non-brand organic search (i.e. visits attributable to SEO) increased by 266% compared to the quarter preceding the SEO work.
