The value of SEO - client experiences 4 times the clicks in just three months

Nowra-based outdoors store, Outdoors and Beyond, launched an online shop mid last year and signed up for an IT Basecamp digital package to work on building the new website's search engine optimisation (SEO) and online presence. Over the next three months, the IT Basecamp SEO team worked with staff at Outdoors and Beyond to ramp up the work staff were already doing with online marketing.

• The starting point was a health audit of the online store to see how well the site was meeting Google's search engine guidelines - the result was a health rating of 85%. Although not a bad result, the top 10% of websites on the Internet have a health rating of 92% and above, so it was important to see what changes could bring the Outdoors and Beyond site into this range. A few tweaks to parts of the website's code, disavowing toxic backlinks and updating missing tags throughout the site and it soon reached a health rating of 92% - a good result for a large site with hundreds of pages.
  
• Keyword research was another focal point, plus comparing these to the keyword ranking of the shop's online competitors. Knowing exactly what keywords a site and its competitors are ranking for opens the doors for planning and controlling how a site appears in Google search results; optimising for core keywords and also finding unexpected keywords that it is valuable to rank for.
  
• keyword optimising images with the results of the keyword research is a powerful SEO tool which is often overlooked and this was the next step to be taken on Outdoors and Beyond's online shop.
  
• Social media analysis in the client's competitive space offers similar advantages to keyword analysis, particularly for companies like Outdoors and Beyond operating in a B2C environment. It enables the client to start monitoring what types of posts attract the most engagement and planning to maximise this going forward. Consolidating digital assets also sends a positive message to the search engine bots that assess websites ... for example posting new content on the website and then linking to this content from social media channels and Google My Business pages (GMB). New website content tells search engines a site is current and dynamic, encouraging users to click through to this content from GMB and social channels increases clicks on the website's stats telling Google that the website content is valuable and leading to better ranking.
  

This combination of technical SEO work, keyword research and optimisation, and ramping up social channels resulted in Outdoors and Beyond seeing a four times increase in clicks from Google search engine results pages (SERPs) from an average of 50 clicks per day in early September 2020 to over 200 clicks a day by January 2021.

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