We started working with Accountant Online in February 2017. The traffic to the website has increased by more than 500% compared to the previous year, resulting in a high influx of new business.
Cube began work in February with an SEO and Content Audit. Both audits required a lot of work.
The company had recently undergone a rebranding, changing the company name, and had moved the content from an old domain to a new one. The redirects from the old domain were incomplete, only the home page was redirecting. This meant that the content on the old site was duplicated on the new site. Setting up 301 redirects quickly solved this duplicate content issue.
There was various on-site duplication which was quickly dealt with as well.
This left us with three main areas to concentrate our SEO efforts on.
- Content & Keyword Research
- Local SEO
- Content Marketing / Link Building
Content and Keyword Research
The content had two issues: the date was in the URLs and the content was not of a great quality.
We 301 redirected all the date URLs to take out the numbers in the URL. Our logic behind this was to allow updating the content without needing to change the URL. For example: if you are running an accountancy blog and you create a post around a review of the government’s budget, it is doubtful whether the posts from previous years are going to be useful.
We prefer to keep the URL as is and just replace the content and publish at the current date whenever the content is updated. This helps SEO in several ways: posts will often already have shares, therefore new content displays social proof, and hopefully, the previous post will have links to it, so we manage to keep building more links to the same URL, making it easier to rank the new content in Google.
The last part of the content problem was solved in-house. The current content wasn’t great, so we started going back to the posts that we thought had potential and re-writing those posts. Posts that were irrelevant to the business goals were deleted, and redirected if considered worthwhile.
The in-house writers have produced industry leading content, and this has made the rest of the SEO much easier.
Keyword research was also completed to create a content map and was used to update current pages.
Local SEO / Google Maps Optimisation
The company had a listing in the previous company name. We changed this over to the new company name and optimised the listing and added photos.
Local citation submissions were completed and a few guest posts were done to help with localisation to the target area.
The website ranks well in one area and work is ongoing for another.
Link Building & Content Marketing
We knew from the audit that link building was going to be the main ongoing SEO task. Competitors had many more links and the company was targeting the whole of Ireland rather than a narrow geographical area.
Links were built from month 2 onward.
Content marketing only became available once the content on the website was of a high enough quality.
Encountered Problems
Along with a change of company name, a redesign of the website was also executed between months 3 and 6. We ran into some issues with the web development company who carried out the redesign. URLs were changed without 301 redirects being put in place, and arguments were put forward that redirects were not required.
The lesson we took away from this was to ensure we had the full trust of the company with regards to all matters SEO before any other company was involved.
Overall, the project has been fairly standard apart from the very high quality content – that is the one factor that has enabled traffic to continue to grow at a very high level. Without the content, the website would still have done well, but the growth would have been less due to Google now being able to detect content that answers the searcher’s query.
