Search engine optimisation case study with Business Moves Group

Business Moves Group (BMG) is an office relocation and workplace change specialist with offices across England and Scotland. We have supported BMG with PR and communications for several years. In December 2020, we started an SEO project to help BMG improve its digital presence and attract more targeted organic traffic. This search engine optimisation case study details the steps we have taken and the results so far.

Keyword research

This was a fundamental part of our foundation work. The first step was to analyse the keywords that BMG ranked for. Most were branded search terms – this means they included the company name in the search. We discussed what keywords BMG wanted to target and carried out in-depth research to identify a list based on search volume, relevance, user intent and keyword difficulty.

This keyword list informed our content marketing strategy which involved creating a blog calendar, location pages, and ensuring that the existing pages on the website were optimised for these keywords.

Results so far

When we started the project, BMG ranked for 29 different keywords. It now ranks for 67, and almost all of the new ones are extremely relevant to the business. A couple of non-branded keywords are ranking on the first page of Google results, and we expect that more will rise up the rankings as we continue our work.

The table below shows a snapshot of keywords that we have targeted, and search position changes from Dec 2020 to July 2021. Keywords without a rank in Dec were not in the top 100 Google search results.

A screenshot showing BMG ranking changes for keywords

A new SEO project can take a few months before being able to record meaningful changes. The snapshot below of key stats from Google Analytics shows the improvements from April – September, compared to the prior six months.

A screenshot from Google Analytics of key website metrics for BMG

In addition to improving BMGs position in search results, content marketing provides premium content for sharing across social media channels. We publish a blog every fortnight and share them on the BMG LinkedIn page, where they get great engagement. Followers and engagement on the page have noticeably increased in the last six months.

Site audit

The other core part of our foundation work was conducting a site audit. We designed and launched the BMG website in the summer of 2020, so it already had good technical SEO fundamentals in place. Our audit included meta titles and descriptions, anchor text, image optimisation and internal linking to ensure that best practice was in place throughout the website.

Results so far

The overall site health, a metric we view in SEMrush, has been steadily improving over time. We monitor the site on an ongoing basis and make changes as needed and implement best practice technical SEO whenever we add a new page.

Business Moves’ current site health is 80% which places the company above the industry average of 77% for Business & Industrial Markets.

Google accounts

We gained access to or created accounts with Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager. This allows us to track and measure all key metrics relating to the website and SEO as well as better index new content in search engine result pages.

Further to the work on Google accounts, we also set up Microsoft accounts with Bing Webmaster Tools to perform a similar function in Bing and Yahoo.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from one website to another and can be considered a “vote”. Generally speaking, the more backlinks you have, the better. However, these need to be legitimate links – paying for backlinks is against Google rules and can result in penalties in the form of a site becoming unranked in search results.

Through our PR work we already secure backlinks with articles we place, and press releases we distribute. As part of our SEO campaign, we have secured links with business listing websites that increase BMG’s exposure and support SEO. We also monitor for BMG mentions online that don’t have a backlink, and reach out to those sites to request one.

Results so far

In December 2020 BMG had 116 referring domains – these are domains that link to businessmoves.com, with 28 from toxic or potentially toxic domains. Toxic domains are links that are likely to be spammy and can harm SEO. Now, BMG has 229 referring domains and over 942 backlinks and just two are from toxic domains. We monitor and build backlinks for BMG, and remove any links from toxic domains unless we believe that the domain is legitimate.

Backlinks help to determine the domains authority score and since we began link building we have reached an authority score of 22 out of 100. This is a good start and should improve with further link building and increasing organic traffic to the website.

Local SEO

BMG is based in Reading and has offices in London, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow. An important part of our work is improving the BMG online presence in each of these markets.

Our first step was to review the Google My Business pages for each location. The pages were being managed by different people and the information on them did not all align. We secured ownership rights for each page and linked them to ensure uniformity.

The BMG Google My Business page for Glasgow

We then created specific location pages for the website.

Each page includes key content including contact details, an overview of BMG services, a blog feed and calls-to-action. The goal is that when people are searching for BMG services in its core markets, these pages will appear high in the search results and a user will find everything they need on the page without having to visit another part of the site.

Results so far

BMG’s average visibility for monitored keywords in the UK is 21.56% (as of October 2021). As a result of the local SEO work around key locations, visibility is improved in:

Scotland 34.14%
Birmingham 33.52%
West Midlands 33.59%
Glasgow11.82%
London >1%

We will further support the local SEO with blogs and PR outreach in those markets.

Business impact

Since we began recording conversions – important actions on the website like phone calls and emails – we’ve recorded an overall conversion rate of 1.53%. The conversion rates from referral sources (16.67%) and organic search (2.66%) are the best, with direct traffic (0.22%) and social media channels (0%) pulling the average down.

Overall, organic traffic is the most effective at delivering the highest number of conversions with 54% of all conversions occurring on the website being attributed to organic traffic sources.

Organic search 53.85%
Direct traffic 23.08%
Referral 20.51%
Social Networks 2.56%

Using the 2.66% conversion rate for organic search, we can estimate that organic search is directly attributable to around 51 conversions from January to September, approximately 6/month. Two-thirds of the conversions are email clicks, with one third being phone calls generated directly from the website.

As organic traffic increases, and we improve the SEO and user experience of the website, we’d expect both the conversion rate and the total number of conversions attributed to organic search to increase further.