How we got VOIP company Inclarity back in the top 10 with a little bit of search engine optimisation.
Inclarity was once the top UK Company for VOIP solutions but, over the last couple of years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of competitors in the space. This, coupled with an out of date web platform, a lack of focus on search engine optimisation (SEO) and a number of relic old pages had meant that Inclarity had slipped down the Google rankings for ‘hosted VOIP‘ and ‘hosted telephony‘. Six weeks ago we started a programme to focus on bringing Inclarity back to its former status. We found that restoring the Inclarity website to its former glory is a bit like restoring things in the physical world: i.e. remove the junk, tidy up the broken bits and give everything some TLC.
We used the SEMRUSH keyword ranking tool to monitor our progress – our before and after of search engine optimisation if you like. In August we started with Inclarity showing up in pages 3 and 4 for their key industry search terms.
Although the Inclarity website isn’t built on WordPress we set up a dummy WordPress website with the Inclarity content in it so that we could ensure the on-page text and meta information (vital for your search engine optimisation) was clean and targeted. Using the Yoast SEO plugin we ensured the website clearly told search engines and users what the Inclarity website was about and the products they offered.
We also re-instated Google Webmaster Tools (or Search Console as it is now known) and rather alarmingly found a large number of crawl errors and pages with broken links. Pages that can’t be found or link to pages that don’t exist any more are bad news for your Google ranking because they are bad news for users – imagine how a prospective customer would feel when they follow a link to your website to find out more about your company and it results in a ‘not found’ page. This was really hurting Inclarity’s reputation, not only amongst search engines but also for potential customers.
Fortunately, within six weeks of tweaking the fundamentals of the website, tidying the pages that are being crawled by Google, and more importantly fixing the user experience (and Google’s perception of the user experience) Inclarity was back in its rightful place in the top 10 results on Google.
This all goes to show there’s no magic bullet to maintain your deserved position in search engines and, much like upkeeping anything else, you need to take care, regularly review things and make sure everything is pristine.
We can now use this new improved online reputation as a launchpad for our content marketing campaigns to capture and nurture more business customers.