On-site SEO – An Early Case Study Proving Its Effectiveness

People often largely underestimate the true power and effectiveness of some simple on-site optimisation when it comes to performing SEO for a client.

I have always understood and appreciated the beauty of great on-site SEO. The small title tag tweaks, the addition of a nifty little breadcrumb or the reorganising of header tags as well as their contents all seem like such small and meaningless things, yet that couldn‘t be further from the truth. These can make all the difference in the world.

We recently took on a new client and agreed to target 10 keywords for them and, as usual, I dove straight into the on-site stuff – it‘s brilliant and always my starting point.

26th November – Tracking Begins

At Epic New Media, we use Positionly to track rankings – it‘s a brilliant tool with daily ranking updates and also backlink discovery notifications provided by Ahrefs.

So, I added all 10 of the keywords we agreed to target to Positionly on the 26th of November and wrote down a list of on-site changes which I thought were required and implemented them as soon as I got FTP details from the client.

These changes included:

– Better targeted titles
– More descriptive descriptions
– Additional content to increase substance
– .htaccess force non-www to www (potential duplicate content issue)
– Breadcrumb (great for users and search engines)

All pretty basic stuff, but things which should never be forgotten or dismissed for any client. I feel these and other on-site optimisations should always be the foundation to any SEO campaign – it increases importance and relevancy for search engines.

10th October – BIG Changes

It hasn‘t been very long at all since this SEO campaign began and we‘ve already made some huge movements in Google, which is fantastic.

I have, of course, built backlinks during this time, which I think is only partially reflected in the growth graph below as these can take some time to be picked up by search engine spiders. You can see the on-site changes take effect in a big way on December 1st and then another spike beginning on December 9th – likely a result of the backlinks.

Here‘s our growth so far:

The graph displays huge ranking changes for our client.

When we started the campaign, none of the keywords were in the first 10 pages of Google (100+) and now 60% of them are in the first 4 pages, which is brilliant.

This just goes to show the true power and effectiveness of some finely researched and cleverly implemented on-site changes before backlinks are even considered a part of the campaign process. Always use every tactic available and you will reap the rewards.

Next Stop, Page 1

These ranking improvements are fantastic, there‘s no doubt about it when we consider that they‘re mainly a result of basic on-site changes, but we‘re never going to bring the client new customers from anywhere but page one – we understand that.

It‘s still very early days, but I‘m confident that this reflects very positive results ahead for this soon-to-be extremely happy client. And that‘s what it‘s all about.