The Brief – SEO services

Sectors: auctions, auto, lifestyle

Fairly loose brief requesting the initial implementation of SEO, providing support to internal team members to allow them to better understand the SEO implications and processes.

To work with the existing website hosts to implement the technical SEO elements and explain to the team what these meant.

Background information

This company had built a strong Brand name in the UK Car Auction space a decade ago and subsequently launched a sister brand.

Neither brand had ever had any type of SEO work and little digital marketing. The sites were built without any marketing or technical advice and consequentially are a little ‘behind the times’. The brands were built on strong credentials of service and quality, trust and excellent reputation for event delivery.

Their GTM accounts were non-existent and analytics and tracking had been neglected.

PPC activity had been run in house without any type of analysis or strategy.

The sister brand had a new website Launch just prior to my arrival in the Spring of 2022

I worked on both sites from August 1st to November 15 2022 and provided additional support for a couple of months after to allow their web agency to implement a quality check and process to allow the best possible implementation of Technical SEO whilst also providing the client with the content and SEO strategy in order to take their business successfully into the future on the digital front.

Timescale

An initial 6 month period was provided to provide the necessary reports and visualisations, implement tracking and tackle the extensive technical debt that had built up within both sites.

The Result

New GA4 container with extensive bespoke reports created in the GA4 Dashboard and explore reports.

Extensive reports and strategy documents, providing detailed analysis of where the two sites were at and what recommended actions should be taken.

Extensive work completed with their webhosts. This agency was not an SEO agency and the sites were hosted on a patchwork of templates on a joomla platform with SP pagebuilder CMS, with the primary database feeding through an API feed with Navision. Much of this was neglected and an array of technical solutions provided to fix issues such as orphan pages, FAQ and schema. I implemented a solution whereby the agency was to provide a regular 2x day per month retainer for technical SEO work and identified, through a structured task list the items that required regular ‘batch’ processing of content urls – this to address issues such as redirects and url parameters.

In addition, there were many housekeeping elements that needed to be addressed – this included things such as programmatically addressing titles and alt tags whilst providing CMS access to elements of schema and OG meta alongside the publishing elements of meta tags.

Further analysis was conducted, and the url structure of the auction lot listings was assessed for the newly launched site (that had suffered severely) in terms of visibility and position due to the structure of the new development. A new programmatic formula created to allow better SEO and page titles, H1s and meta to be populated, with extensive research completed to ascertain the backlinks to these pages, many of which had not been honoured during the new launch.

The result after 5 months was a record-breaking auction for the main brand, attracting more online bidders and bidders from around the world, this was largely due to a well-orchestrated PPC campaign with strong strategic acumen and time-intensive content approach from the perspective of a multi-campaign ad-groups with highly targeted copy and implementation of many of the additional features, images and product prices.

The sister site enjoyed the benefits of increased position and visibility with a 10-point increase in site performance and a structure to address the technical SEO on an ongoing basis.

Both sites benefited from quite a drastic improvement in CTR rates, this, particularly visible during the pre-auction surge in traffic and a result of the improved Meta and description information.

Additionally, the performance and engagement levels across both sites were fully recorded.

The images below demonstrate the SEO colour-wheel theory.

Show the harm that the sister brand suffered when their web agency re-launched their website in April/May.

Some summary stats of what experienced SEO can do in a short time-frame.

Experienced SEO Services

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