When I was back in the UK last week I had to present a Web Marketing Strategy to one of World Wide Creative’s clients: Credit Control Solutions (or CCS as we say in the studio). We have recently refreshed the design of the site, as well as revised the content (see screenshot below).
When we put together a strategy we look for possibilities that exist for improving the site’s position in the natural search results. The competitiveness of CCS’ services online meant that not a lot of opportunity existed other than focusing on specific locations.
The interesting thing during our research was that despite having zero positioning in the results, there was good historical data about the site. Five years ago when the old site was originally built it did reasonably well. However, in the last three years it hasn’t gained any search engine traffic and hasn’t produced any enquiries.
Knowing that Google places a lot of value in the history of a domain, I was interested to see if Google would remember the fact that the site once performed well and: if good content was added and a few SEO tweaks made, would it respond? I mentioned this at the presentation suggesting we hold fire on certain aspects of the strategy until we could gauge this "unknown factor".
The result of the news site have been amazing. This is the email we received from Credit Control Solutions this morning:
"WOW. ! !
I’ve just done a search in Google for "selective debtor coveage" and guess who came up first – credit control solutions of course. I’ve also just searched "outsourced credit control" and CCS now appears at the top of the second page. I’ve also searched "outsourced credit control kent" and we appeared towards the bottom of page 1? How can this be? This is phenomenal!!!
Later in the day we got this one through:
"What is going on??? I just typed in "Credit Control" in Google and limited it to UK only, and we came out on Page 2. Whatever you’ve done keep doing it.
I’ve had 3 enquiries in the last week. That is 2 more enquires than I’ve had in the last 2 years. I am astounded, amazed and very excited about what the future holds"
So what has happened? I like to call this the "unknown factor". We know that Google can react well if the site has good history and the right things are put in place from a content and SEO basis. But I must admit, even i wasn’t expecting a result like this. It shows that Google will remember a site from at least a couple of years ago and still be willing to give it a chance if pushed.
- Perky
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Hi Mike,
I agree with all of your comments – I continue to be astounded by the new enquiries that I am receiving from the newly designed website that you created for me.
Jamie – “Making your Cash Flow”