SEO for a Web Design Company
We were approached through SEO, on our site by a web designer based in Limerick. They wanted to invest in SEO to increase positions for web design and branding in the local area.
Services provided:
SEO
After reviewing the website and rankings we found a few challenges:
- the site didn't rank at all for the main keyword: web design in Limerick. Neither maps (2nd page) nor organically in search results (on position 70).
- Quite challenging, but we had confidence since we managed to rank the honestmarketing.ie site for digital marketing. Spoiler alert - there wouldn’t be any case study if the results weren’t positive right?
SEO for Web Design
Te first question you ask yourself as an SEO is „how competitive is the web design space in the local area“? or you want to get an idea of how hard it is to rank there.
- SEO for web design has a few characteristics:
- 1. Backlinks – web design sites get links from the sites they make. This makes the web design firms that made a lot of sites rank better. Because links from other sites are a ranking factor. Especially if they get local links, from local or national businesses.
- 2. Content on the site – an important ranking factor. The challenge here was if you want to rank for web design in your city, you would need to put that in the content. This is a challenge from a:
- 1.1. Business standpoint – you might turn away people coming to your site that are in different locations. If you emphasise that you are a web design company in city x, some people will think you only work with businesses in your location.
- 1.2. Readability and web page accessibility - One of the more common but least talked about problems in SEO. You don't want to stuff the page with keywords, after all it is a web design, branding site. The content should be on a popular page accessible in the navigation. Homepage ideally, or you could test to make a separate page just for this keyword. The risk here is that the page still should be linked from the menu. Of course, the homepage has a better chance of ranking.
- 1.3. The Design of the page. Similar to the wording problem, to rank for web design you need to have that text content on the page. Web designers usually advocate for as little text content as possible. Unfortunately text content still ranks. Not only that but the position of the text on the page matters for SEO. E.g. putting “web design company” on the bottom of the page will have less SEO impact than if it was on top of the page. This is an old and everlasting issue between SEO’s and Web designers.
Backlink Audit
Se
The site had links from the sites they made + some solid links that were linking to the old domains. We had to fix that.
Technical SEO Audit
A detailed technical audit of the site was made. The site had a lower speed score which was corrected by installing a different plugin.
Content Audit
The content wasn't enough focused on the keywords. This was a particular challenge because we didn't want to change the tone or design of the site to fit in keywords.
Results for the web design keyword
Rankings improved from position 77 to position 4 in organic results for Web design Limerick!
The biggest jump into 1st page came after 2-3 months time. Recently the positions improved to position 4 and in the top results on maps.
Google my business rankings matter a lot for local businesses. Almost more than the site rankings. Because Google often features a local pack of businesses for local searches like Web design Limerick (Example on the right).
Google my business rankings for web design improved drastically, but slowly. The business was on the 2nd page on Google maps. After 2 months it moved to 1st page and 10th position in maps. This was an improvement, but not enough since the business is located directly in the city.
Now, some 5 months after the business is ranking in the top 3 results on the 1st page for web design, which is amazing!
Contact us for an online meeting
Send us your website link or business name and what you want to achieve. We will take a look and come back to you. 🙂