We were approached by the owner of a local Bed and Breakfast Guest House in Manly, Northern Beaches, Sydney (cecilstreetbb.com.au) to see if we could help them with optimising their website to get better rankings in the search engines and help increase enquiries as they weren’t appearing anywhere near page one on the Google search results.
Being a local Northern Beaches website design and marketing business ourselves we put together a plan and proceeded in updating their and optimising their website.
SEO Audit
After reviewing and auditing her website we found the following issues needed to be addressed:
- The website was not mobile friendly
- It loaded too slow
- Lack of content and page structure
- Poor general SEO issues
- No Google Business page
The Fixes
With a clear list of issues we needed to resolve we set about prioritising and fixing them one by one.
1. Making Mobile Friendly
This was one of the first jobs we undertook as this really needed to be set up before anything else as it was the basis of the whole website. This meant rebuilding the whole website on a whole new ‘mobile friendly’ template in keeping with her original design and branding.
Almost 70% of web searches are now on mobile so Google places a lot of emphasis on Mobile Optimisation and rewards websites that are mobile responsive. This is now a must!
2. Speeding up the website
Website speed is another critical factor because if your website is too slow then the visitor will click back out of the website and look elsewhere. Google are also monitoring this and will penalise you so having a slow website. After all, Google wants to promote a good service by only showing results that benefit heir users.
Fortunately the speed of the website was helped by the new website template we installed although we also removed a lot of unnecessary plugins and code that were also making the website a bit sluggish.
3. Adding more content and structure
We found the content to be very basic and certainly not enough to gain good traction and ranks well in the search engines. Although content is always King, it certainly helps to have good quality content that is structured well for both the reader and the Search Engines.
We produced more content, images and pages to which were structured to help both the user find their way around the website giving additional useful information about Manly itself and Search Engine Optimised content that helped the Google search bots know what the website is about.
4. Fixing the SEO Issues
Some of these issues were already taken care of when updating the template, speed and content. However, we still needed to do some work on adding the following SEO updates:
- Adding a sitemap
- Adding Alt tags to the images
- Adding relevant internal links
- Including keyword rich meta titles and descriptions to each page
5. Creating a Google Business Page
If you are a business of any kind, especially a local business, you need a Google Business page. Having a Google Business page is a great signal to Google that you are a legitimate business in your local area and it will help boost your ranking. Not only in the organic search results, but in the maps section of the results. If you haven’t noticed already, whenever you make search for a locally based or area specific business Google will show a map with the most relevant top 3 or 4 businesses in that area. It’s a great way to get on the first page of Google and if you don’t have a Google Business page listing, you’re losing out.
We managed to get Cecil Street B&B to the number one result on the Google map out ranking all the other businesses in the area.
The Results
It look about 2 – 3 months to gain traction with the search engines with all the updates we made and Linda saw a rise in enquiries and is constantly booked out! Even with the rise in popularity of websites and apps like booking.com and Airbnb!
If you need help with search engine rankings and local SEO strategies for your Northern Beaches business then get in touch with us and we’ll put a strategy in place to get you ranking! email [email protected] or call 1300 685 312
