Apex, an internationally recognised expert in their field of hydraulic cylinder repairs and manufacture, tasked me with increasing their organic visibility.
After a bad experience with their previous SEO Agency & needing to recover from a Google penalty, there was a lot of work required to place Apex where it should be, as an industry leader in their field.
As with any project that I work on, full situational analysis was conducted. The analysis wasn’t limited to KW / Topic research, backlink audits, competition & on-site factors. An understanding of the business as a whole is critical in identifying the commercial priorities, which in turn influence the product/service targets. Understanding product/service margins, volume of searches, SERP competitiveness etc were understood in order to weight campaigns accordingly.
With the research in hand, we developed an on-site optimisation strategy and a PR strategy – identifying the content & placement targets. Historical links that proved to be harmful were disavowed and removed.
We spent a lot of time understanding the industry, identifying the key magazines & the content they delivered, and developing relationships with the editors to understand from their perspective the content that their users valued.
Successful Online PR achieves two critical goals – (i) Brand development – increased recognition / trust with potential clients (ii) Improved reputation within the search engines for greater organic visibility.
Project
SEO, Online PR & Results
Client
Apex Hydraulics
What I Did
Backlink Analysis, Placement Research, Content Development & PR (With the help of a freelance copy writer).
SEO
Online PR & Brand Development
The primary goal of link building should be brand development. This is why link building should be seen as online PR. The aim is to achieve brand awareness through reputable & authoritative media outlets. We achieved that for Apex across a number of leading industry journals.
SEO
Organic Visibility shifted from 11% to 94%
The Technical, Architectural & On-Page optimisations provided the necessary foundation for the ability to shift organic visibility through online PR. Online PR is necessary to increase & retain visibility in competitive categories within search. When done well, the reputation of the site in the eyes of search engines is significantly boosted beyond anything that on-site optimisations could achieve on their own. Once the domain authority is significantly increased it will begin to effect the all the categories on the site, even those categories that have not been specifically targeted.
