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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Last Updated on March 7, 2023
