SEO Case Study #7: Plumbers & Their Pipes

There’s only so much where you can talk about other people’s SEO without showing everyone how well you do with your own. So here it is: the plumber reveals the state of his own pipes in our SEO case study #7.

For those unfamiliar with Google Analytics (which should be NONE of you!), the blue line is April 2018 and the orange line is April 2017. This is only the traffic from organic Google searches.

It’s a fairly clear differential between the two same months, a year apart. Inside another piece of software I use to track rankings, I ranked in the top ten for 19 different ‘digital marketing’-focused keywords in Australia with traffic ranging from 20 searches per month, all the way up to 720.

How did I do it?

I’m not going to a huge amount of detail on this SEO case study because that will be useful for other blogs, but I wanted to list the key steps so you could get an idea of what it takes to smash your SEO. Top ten ideas here.

1. Work out the keywords – I used the Google Keyword Tool to work out what phrases has traffic and then I built the structure of the site and offerings around that. After all, best to probably offer what people are looking for right?
2. Content, content, content. Blogs, podcasts and so on.
3. The sharing of all that content on social media and across enewsletters.
4. Making sure the enewsletter with that content went out frequently. If not fortnightly then at least monthly.
5. Correct on-page optimisation – titles, descriptions, alt tags in images and headings.
6. Backlinks from other high authority websites. This can include a ‘boring’ forum link or more complex and time-consuming swapping of blogs and content.
7. Google My Business reviews – asking key clients and partners to go to Google reviews and talk about their experience with our business.
8. Fix technical shit on the site. Well, truth be told, Matt helped with this.
9. Structure. Everything is easy to find and it’s hard to get lost in the site. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
10. PPC. I avoid Adwords now; there’s not much point. But other PPC like Facebook and Outbrain keeps the new traffic coming in.

There’s not much more to it than this. Obviously, all these things take time – undertaking a podcast is hardly a quick fix for example. But it makes a difference.