SEO & Content Marketing Results Challenge for Deborah Hartl Designs

Would you like to watch a small business SEO case study in progress? SEO for Small Business and Article Writers Australia have teamed up to assist a small business – Deborah Hartl Designs – by providing free SEO and content writing services for the next 6 months. We’re calling it our Content Marketing & SEO Results Challenge. Each month we’ll be posting details of our strategy and the results so that other small business owners can see what it takes to improve visibility online. For now, we’d like to introduce you to Deborah and her fabulous bridal headpieces and explain why she needs assistance and what we’ll be doing.

Deborah’s story

Deborah Hartl creates unique bridal headpieces, from beach inspired designs to floral crowns. She’s good at what she does – the 2015 edition of UK Brides features one of her designs. Deborah established a website for online sales and a Facebook page, but absolutely nothing happened – almost nobody was visiting her website. She did a little research and wondered if creating additional content like blog posts would help – but even if they would, there was no budget left to pay for ongoing content marketing or SEO services.

Unfortunately, this is a situation a lot of start-ups find themselves in soon after investing in a website. But with a little know how, you can get things moving even if you have a limited budget. I hope the details we publish during our 6 month challenge to help Deborah will be useful for people in a similar situation.

Will blog posts help Deborah’s site?

Yes. They’ll make a massive difference – but not before a couple of other matters have been attended to. The first one is keyword research and concept research. The website content on the site when we first viewed it contained no relevant keyword phrases and there was no structured data to help define concepts and entities. Keyword phrases and structured data are very important components of content and site code because they tell Google and other search engines what your site is about. It’s only when your site is indexed by search engines for certain terms and objects that your site pages can be presented in the search results that are displayed when people search using those key terms. So, without the right keywords in the content and structured data in the page code, your site may simply never be found by people looking for your product or services.

Where to begin with SEO – December 2014

The biggest problem is also the most basic – the lack of keywords in the content and structured data within the site code. To resolve this there are four things that need to be done:

1. Keyword research to identify the relevant keyword terms and search numbers
2. Concept research to discover the meaning of each page for your website
3. Revision of the website content to incorporate the keyword terms most likely to draw traffic to Deborah’s website.
4. Inclusion of structured data to define concepts and entities for each page

In the past week, we’ve completed the keyword research and concept research, and Leonie has revised Deborah’s website content in line with the research. Costs normally associated with this would be around $400 for the research, and $150 per page (or more) for website content. However, it is possible to undertake your own keyword research using a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner.  Similarly, once you’ve decided on your keywords, you can write your own content – but if you need to do that, do your research on best practice when it comes to website copywriting, don’t overuse the keyword phrases, and have someone proof read your content before you add it to your website to ensure it reads well and doesn’t contain errors. Poorly written content can make people think twice about using your business as it raises the question of how important quality is to you.

The next task is also relatively easy – getting the search engines to index the site pages for relevant terms. We’re hoping the pages will be indexed and attracting visitors by January as that’s the start of a busy season when it comes to wedding related enquiries.

Together with the research above, we’ve also consulted on socia media so that Deborah can start engaging with her target audience on relevant social platforms.

Google Analytics has also been setup so that we can collect important metrics each month to monitor the progress of the campaign. Similarly, Google Webmaster Tools was setup to monitor indexing and other issues with your site on Google.

So, as you can see, we have covered some basic, though critical foundational steps during January which allows us to move forward with other optimisation steps and content and social strategies.

Stay tuned for further progress during January 2015!