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SEO Case Study – MAD-HR Ltd doubled traffic

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MAD-HR are an HR Consultancy supporting business of all sizes through HR Support, Strategy Consultancy and Compliance. With offices in Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex, MAD-HR helps companies grow and thrive by helping them ‘Make a Difference’. They are experts in helping business owners and managers develop teams that are efficient, passionate and profitable.

seo case study mad-hr

What issues were they facing?

MAD-HR have always had a strong focus on growth through excellent practice and Digital Marketing, including SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). In late 2020 the company approached Yeseo to explore ways to increase their market share and visibility in Google Search results.

MAD-HR wanted to build on their success to increase organic traffic to www.mad-hr.co.uk

Over the preceding years, the company had increased the amount of content they were creating and had a strong desire to ensure that their website continued to show an increasing ROI.

What did they ask us to do?

Carole Burman, Managing Director of MAD-HR asked us to look at their website and develop a strategy to ensure existing content and new content increased their visibility, and delivers the right type of visitors to their website.

During the early phase of the project, we worked closely with James Kindred of Fork, who was developing a new website for MAD-HR. We have worked with Fork many times over the years and we knew their excellent website-building skills, combined with our SEO knowledge, would help ensure the new MAD-HR website would perform well in SERPs (search engine results) as soon as possible after launch.

What happened next?

During the development phase we used keyword research to help build a site structure that aligned with the keywords we mutually agreed to target for increased rankings. We started a continuous on-site audit of the website, looking for optimisations and fixing issues that might stand in the way of Google understanding the authority and importance of the site. This rolling audit continues to this day.

Because MAD-HR have always been prolific writers of exceptionally high-quality content we developed a strategy to ensure that the articles being written answer specific questions being asked by potential new clients. The content strategy was also developed to re-enforce the company’s reputation as thought leaders in the field of Human Resources.

James Kindred of Fork continues to collaborate with MAD-HR and Yeseo to ensure the website is fast, and reliable and offers its viewers a great user experience. As with all of our clients, MAD-HR has a fantastic understanding of their audience; it was our job to ensure their audience continues to grow.

One aspect of James’s work as a web developer that has been particularly potent in helping us achieve increasingly positive SEO results is his adherence to excellent ‘Core Web Vitals’ practice. We constantly monitor Google Search Console (among many other tools) to ensure the MAD-HR stays healthy and understood by Google.

What was the outcome?

Over the past two years that we have worked with MAD-HR, the number of visitors to their website has more than doubled. There has been a significant increase in the number of targeted keywords the site ranks for.

organic seo keyword growth chart
Data from Semrush

Between the start of 2021 and the start of 2023 the number of organic keywords the MAD-HR website ranks for has risen from 1,300 to around 2,400.

history seo organic keyword growth chart
Data from Semrush

In this graph, we can see that the early success in Google Search results was capitalised on and grew significantly.

referring domains for mad-hr website graph
Data from Semrush

High-quality, optimised articles naturally help increase the number of links to client sites from third-party sites. This naturally helps SEO by showing Google how authoritative a website is. During 2022 the MAD-HR website gained a healthy number of organic backlinks.

traffic increase chart
Data from Google Analytics

Data from Google Analytics shows that if we compare the number of visitors to the website from 18th December 2021 to January 2023 to the number of visitors from the same period two years ago we can see that the number of people visiting the MAD-HR website has nearly doubled over the last two years.

traffic acquisition graph from google analytics
Data from Google Analytics

Organic search increases can partly be attributed to market trends and fluctuations in demand, as well as increased rankings, but the fact that the number of people arriving at the MAD-HR website from Google Search results nearly doubled in the last two years is incredibly encouraging.

What do MAD-HR think of these results?

“Yeseo have exceeded our expectations, they have not only helped us achieve higher search engine rankings, but also increased our online visibility and website traffic. We couldn’t be more pleased with the results.”

Carole Burman, Managing Director, MAD-HR Ltd

Would you like to find out if your website could benefit from Search Engine Optimisation in the same way MAD-HR are enjoying? Get in touch today to find out more about how Yeseo can help!

Find out more about MAD-HR Ltd

Find out more about Fork

How to Choose an SEO Agency — Five Tips from the Inside

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Getting the SEO right for your website can mean the difference between whether or not people find you. And that’s a big deal. Most small businesses nowadays rely heavily on their name coming up near the top in response to the right Google query — rather than being hidden somewhere on page seven.

choosing an seo agency featured image

The good news is that there are SEO agencies everywhere, who all claim they can get it right for you. The bad news is that only a minority really will deliver on that promise. So how do you pick out the right SEO agency? Well, finding out how they measure up to these five questions will go a long way to giving you an answer.

1. Do They Promise the Earth?

Have you come across SEO agencies who guarantee to get you on page one of Google? Or even to get you to the top spot?

The reality is that, however brilliant an agency is, they can’t reliably deliver very specific promises like that. So beware of any SEO agency that makes promises about specific ranking improvements or claims they can tell you exactly how long it will be before you’ll start seeing the improvements.

2. How Much Work Will You Need to Do?

Is an SEO agency telling you that they’ll achieve all the improvements they’re promising without you having to do a stroke of work?

Working on your SEO is a partnership between you and the agency, not something the agency does behind the scenes. Yes, the agency will provide a comprehensive plan and carry out much of the work, but some it will be down to you. If there’s no work for you to do, then be suspicious.

3. What Will the Reporting Cover?

The agency you select should provide you with a monthly report of your SEO’s performance. But do you know what should be in that report?

Though it may vary slightly, there are certain elements that must be in the report. It should cover what rankings have moved, an executive summary and a list of tasks completed in the proceeding month. If the agency isn’t promising to provide any part of this, it’s worth asking why.

4. How Long Does an Average Client Stay with the SEO Agency?

One key way of assessing an SEO agency offering its services is to find out about their existing clients, in particular how long clients stay with them.

Not all clients will be long-term. Some projects are naturally only three or six months long, but really great SEO agencies will have clients they’ve been working with for years. If they can’t provide at least a few examples of this, there has to be a question mark about them.

5. Do They Listen?

Does the agency tell you they’ll come up with a list of keywords without the need to talk to you about it?

Yes, SEO is data-led, but the keywords being targeted need to match your strategic goals for your company. An SEO agency can only achieve this by talking to you in depth about your business as a whole and finding out what you’re trying to achieve.

Do you want to find out more about what to expect from an SEO agency? Get in touch with us to talk about how to give your SEO a boost.

Moving to WordPress – SEO case study

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Combined Office Interiors SEO case study

Combined Office Interiors is a company that helps businesses with office moves, refurbishments, redesigns and relocations. Using a combination of supplying furniture and services, including space planning, project management and consultation, they ensure that their clients enjoy fast and painless workspace transformations.

seo case study combined office interiors featured image

With a head office in Cambridgeshire, Combined Office Interiors has been established for over twenty years. Their area of operations has expanded and now takes in much of the East of England, the Midlands and the South-East. They can provide anything from a new office chair to a complete refurbishment.

What Were the Issues They Were Facing?

Combined Office Interiors had been using the same website for some time, and on the face of it, everything seemed fine. It appeared to be a good site, and they were doing all the right things with it — including, crucially, publishing good content on a regular basis.

It was clear, however, that something was wrong. The site simply wasn’t ranking on Google or other search engines, especially against competitors. But that wasn’t all. They also weren’t ranking well in the specific geographical areas they were targeting.

What Did They Request Us to Do?

Combined Office Interiors asked Yeseo to take a look at their website, to identify and fix whatever issues were preventing it from ranking. So we carried out extensive research, not only into the website itself, but also into the website builder that had been used. And this is where the main problem turned out to be.

Whereas most sites these days are built on one of the common, easily accessible builders, such as WordPress, Shopify or Drupal, Combined Office Interiors’ site had been built on a proprietary website builder. This had been a positive upgrade on the previous WIX site and had worked excellently for some time. Over the years, however, the performance became less effective, and the problems weren’t as easy to fix as if it had been built, for instance, on WordPress.

How Did We Solve the Problem?

Since it was difficult to sort out the SEO issues on the proprietary platform, we decided that the best solution would be to transfer the website as it stood to WordPress, where fixes for the problems were easily available. This had to be done manually, as there wasn’t a way of automatically copying it over.

Once on WordPress, we took the opportunity to improve a variety of issues:

  • We renamed image files to make them more SEO-friendly.
  • We reduced the size of some image files to make them load more quickly.
  • We improved some of the titles on the site, again to improve their SEO value.
  • We improved parts of the menu, making the site easier to navigate.

We also reduced the number of pages on the website. In some cases, there would be a root page and then numerous subpages, and in most cases we were able to condense all the subpage information into a single page, again dramatically improving the ease of navigation.

We also set up the web hosting for Combined Office Interiors and spoke to the host on their behalf.

What Was the Outcome?

We’d expected the work we did to improve the results of the website on search engines, but the results took even us by surprise. Instead of the site moving up a few places for the various keywords, within weeks it had risen substantially — in one case, for instance, by 80 places.

This was reflected by concrete results. The site was getting not only more visitors, but better-quality ones, as well as a lot more enquiries. These included extremely good enquiry requests and new sales from customers who’d never heard of Combined Office Interiors before.

What Did Combined Office Interiors Think of This?

Combined Office Interiors were understandably delighted with the results. Marketing Manager Tanya Shields said:

We were expecting this to be a difficult process, but although we appreciate how much work Yeseo put in, it turned out to be very painless for us. We’re delighted with the results, and we’ve already seen an excellent ROI for these changes. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with Andrew and the Yeseo team.”

Do you think your website should be performing better? Give Yeseo a call and find out if we can make the same transformation as we did for Combined Office Interiors.

Visit the Combined Office Interiors website.

Moving to WordPress FAQ

Is moving from Wix to WordPress dangerous for SEO

The short answer is ‘probably not’. The long answer depends on how much content you have, how well-written it is, how good your keyword research is and who is linking to your website. So everything comes down to one question, how good is your SEO? If you’ve never done SEO then a move to WordPress will almost definitely help your rankings. Google doesn’t care which system you use to build your website.

Can I transfer my website to WordPress automatically?

For some website-building platforms, there are ways of transferring automatically, but we recommend being cautious. Even with the very best automatic transfer system, you might be missing out on the opportunity to do some good search engine optimisation. Improving your rankings is rarely about finding the most pain-free method for improving your website!

How can I tell I need to change my website to WordPress?

In our experience, being unable to make ranking improvements could be the first warning sign that your current website needs to be replaced. In reality, we tend to find that lack of useful SEO functionality pushes clients towards WordPress before dramatically dropping rankings.

Is WordPress the only website builder for good SEO?

Absolutely not, there are many better ways to build a beautifully optimised website that Google will adore, but no other website-building platform offers so much ranking power combined with such good usability. WordPress is (relatively) simple to build with, so the people who build your website will charge you less than for building on other platforms.

What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

WordPress.com is a blogging platform based on WordPress, but it is very restricted in terms of flexibility compared to ‘proper’ WordPress. The version of WordPress that can be obtained for free from wordpress.org (or installed in many other ways) is the superior website builder.

What’s Your Return on Investment for Your SEO — and How Do You Tell?

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The most important question to ask about any type of marketing is, quite simply, “Is it worth what I’m paying for it?” In other words, what’s the return on investment (ROI)?

SEO ROI featured image

SEO is no different, except that in many ways the ROI is harder to calculate than, for example, pay-per-click advertising. This is because SEO is very much a long-term strategy, so short-term measurements don’t always tell the whole story. So how can you best calculate your ROI on your SEO campaign?

Why is Measuring Your SEO Important?

It’s calculated that, for an average business, around 53% of web traffic comes from organic search — and it’s the quality of the website’s SEO that determines how effective that organic search will be.

SEO isn’t free, though, whether or not you keep it in house. Costs may include a proportion of personnel salaries, costs of outsourcing to an agency and cost of tools and software. Clearly, you need to be able to demonstrate that this is money well spent, and you can’t do that without knowing what rate of ROI you’re getting from the SEO.

How Do You Measure Your SEO’s Effectiveness?

The easiest do-it-yourself method of measuring the effectiveness of your SEO is to use Google Analytics to measure your conversion rate. You then estimate the average value of each conversion and multiply the two figures together. Finally, you divide the figure by the costs to get the ROI.

For example, suppose you achieve 20 conversions over the period you’re measuring, and you’ve estimated the average value of a conversion is £1,000, while you’ve spent £5,000 on SEO. The calculation would be (20 x 1,000)/5,000 = 4 — making your ROI 400%.

How to calculate SEO ROI

Initial SEO Spend

£5,000

Average Conversion Value

£1,000

Number of Sales

20 sales made

Return on Investment

£20,000

ROI of 400%
(£20,000 ÷ £5,000)

This isn’t too difficult to estimate if you have an ecommerce site, but for other types of websites there are a number of problems. For one thing, the decision to visit your website may have been the result of seeing your brand multiple times, while similarly a customer may visit your site several times before converting. The calculations can become extremely complex.

DIY or Use an Expert?

Suppose your car needs maintenance — what do you do? Do you dig out the manual, open the bonnet and try to fix it yourself? Or do you take it to a garage?

Well, that might depend on your interests and your level of expertise. If you love tinkering with engines and you have a good idea of what you’re doing, you might decide to do it yourself. But even then you almost certainly won’t get as good a result as if you left it to a professional mechanic with both extensive experience and access to the latest diagnostic software.

In the same way, you can learn to do your own SEO and even (if you’re anything like us) find you enjoy doing it. On the other hand, you’re likely to get a better ROI by spending a little extra on the services of experts. Not to mention having access to cutting-edge ways of measuring what that ROI actually is.

If you use Yeseo, you’ll be able to see the results at a glance. Instead of a mass of impenetrable figures, we’ll send you a monthly report about your traffic, written in Human, not in Jargon, with a simple executive summary that tells it to you straight.

Give us a shout to find out more about how you can not only improve the ROI for your SEO expenses, but also always have the results at your fingertips.

SEO ROI FAQ

What is ROI in SEO?

ROI or (return on investment) is a method of calculating how much extra money your business has made after making an investment in SEO.

How do you calculate SEO ROI?

The short answer is ‘have you made more money since doing SEO?’ The longer answer involves mathematics – Calculate and average value of each of your sales. Multiply that value by the number of sales you have made. Divide the total value by the amount of money you have spent on SEO. This will give you a number you can multiply by 100 to get a percentage showing your ROI.

How do you forecast the ROI of SEO

You can’t, at least not accurately. But a good SEO agency will refuse to work with you if they don’t see your potential to earn a good ROI on your investment. SEO isn’t always the answer!

Reviving former rankings – Best Badges Ltd

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SEO Audit Case Study — Best Badges Ltd

An Ipswich-based company, Best Badges Ltd supply badges and other promotional items to customers who include government agencies, clubs and organisations, schools and colleges, small businesses and multinationals, charities and resellers.

seo case study image best badges

Although supplying other promotional materials, Best Badges Ltd specialise in badges of all kinds, ranging from traditional enamel badges to stamped metal and embroidered badges. Besides the range of clients already mentioned, they supply badges to everyone from the Guides and Scouts to bands and other creatives.

What Were the Issues They Were Facing?

We’ve had a long association with Best Badges Ltd, having worked with them for twenty years. When they recently upgraded their old website to a much more fit-for-purpose e-commerce site, we helped them with the migration.

With a site that loaded quickly and provided a great user experience, they naturally hoped their Google rankings would improve to the level they’d enjoyed some years ago. However, despite some improvement, this never quite happened.

So what was the problem? They had great backlinks, but something wasn’t right.

What Did They Request Us to Do?

Best Badges Ltd had run out of options to try. They appeared to be doing everything right in terms of SEO, but they still weren’t getting the results.

This was when they asked us to look in depth at their SEO strategy and find out what was holding them back from returning to their former high-ranking status.

How Did We Solve the Problem?

We carried out an extensive technical SEO audit of the new website and came to some interesting conclusions. Best Badges Ltd had been right — their website was fine. However, there were a number of low-level optimisations that needed to be made — some that could be done by their team and others that would need to go to the developers who’d built the new website.

First of all, we worked with the team at Best Badges Ltd on the problems they could fix themselves. We looked at every part of the site they could reach through the dashboard and helped them optimise all these. At the same time, we worked with them on identifying the changes that needed to be made by the developers.

As it happened, the developers had actually coded the site themselves, rather than building it on a mainstream platform like WordPress, SquareSpace or Spotify. This meant that, when we went to discuss the necessary changes with them, we were able to speak to the people who’d actually done the original coding and were therefore able to come up with tailored solutions to what we asked them to do.

What Was the Outcome?

After we’d helped both Best Badges Ltd and the web developers to implement the various deep technical optimisations we’d identified, the result was spectacular. Within just a few months, they’d returned to their former glory in the rankings — and this wasn’t a flash in the pan. Best Badges Ltd now ranks at position 1 on Google in the UK for over 100 targeted search terms.

What Did Best Badges Ltd Think of This?

Needless to say, Best Badges Ltd were delighted with this result.

We couldn’t be happier about working with Yeseo. They have always listened to us, and at every turn have been completely tuned in to our business needs. Everything has been communicated in a way that we can understand, and the projects felt collaborative in nature as well as measurable in results. Their ethos from the start was about building a long term relationship and consistently delivering on clear objectives – and on both scores we are extremely satisfied.

Richard Maydell, Best Badges Ltd

Do you feel your Google rankings aren’t working as they should? Get in touch with us here at Yeseo and find out if we can turn around your optimisation as we turned around Best Badges Ltd.

Visit the Best Badges website.