Environmental Construction Solutions Limited
Established in 2002, Environmental Construction Solutions Limited (or ECS for short) are specialists in surface and wastewater management, with a successful track record both Nationally & Internationally.
How was the performance of the ECS website judged at the beginning of the project?
In the beginning, ECS was not ranking well and had several toxic links to their site. These issues and errors caused a negative impact on ranking. The website originally had 3 keywords in the top 10 with a handful ranking at around 90. The average rank for their keywords was around 80th position.
Their website was also developed in an old technology – ASP.NET – and was not responsive, meaning that it did not look optimal on mobile phones and handheld devices. This, in turn, is a de-ranking factor with the major search engines.
How is ECS ranking now?
At the time of writing the site has 9 key ranking phrases in the top 10 results on Google with an average position of 65. Their traffic has doubled which has resulted in a much wider reach to their customer base.
Have there been any other impacts on the website’s performance?
Thanks to the changes to multiple aspects of the on-page SEO, off-page SEO and website build, the website now has much-improved health. The site now works on over 100 browsers across many operating systems and devices. The number of issues the site had has been dramatically reduced and moving forward the client has a great platform to market their business.
What are SEO and SERPs?
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of improving the ranking of a website on search engines.
Split into 2, there is on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO consists of many elements, an example of which is creating metadata on pages and images, researching and using keywords in relevant headings and sub-headings. Off-page SEO are strategies that affect the site externally, such as a links into the site, domain health, social bookmarking and content marketing.
Search Engine Results Pages or SERP are the results of searching on search engines using various keywords and phrases. Improvements in SERPs are usually the direct result of SEO. An example of a SERP would be the results a user is faced with when they make a Google search. Some examples of SERPs are organic results and paid results; as the name suggests paid results are results that have purchased and are also known as pay per click or PPC for short. Organic results produced by ranking the site for each keyword or phrases using a variety of on-site and off-site criteria.
How did we improve upon ECS’s SERPs?
Firstly, we created a list of keywords and phrases that are relevant to the business and the content within the site. Once we had a carefully researched set of keywords, we worked on the website’s on-page SEO. This consisted of creating metadata for pages, editing existing content, adding new content and auditing tags on images. The addition of metadata marries well with keywords as it informs Google what the page is about and assists in ranking and click-throughs.
We checked each page for possible improvements and made the appropriate changes and additions; both bolstering the relevance of the page to keywords and ensuring that each page had enough text to satisfy the search engines. Having errors, warnings or issues on a site can be toxic to chances of ranking for keywords. Search engines compare your site against the competition; other sites in the same industry with similar keywords and content.
Our ongoing on-site SEO required our continual monitoring of keyword performance. We reported the rankings of website keywords – making suggestions and editing content where appropriate. The client received a monthly report, so they could have full visibility to our progress.
We also performed off-site SEO, by conducting an extensive review of all links into the site. We assessed each one and where a link to the site was deemed toxic – negative to the website – we used our software to remove the link from the search engine databases.
