The SEO Journey - A BRS Case Study

How the Brave River Solutions Search Engine Optimization team worked to increase search engine rankings and website performance to achieve higher quality leads and traffic.

SUMMARY

Brave River Solutions has been an industry leader since the company first established back in 2000. Providing excellence in digital technology solutions for clients throughout the country has brought BRS to the top of the leaderboard, but this success had not been represented accurately within the online performance figures.

BRS is known for a history of accommodating client relations and quality business technology services, and continues to strive for superiority. Website and search engine ranking insights were not up to par with the high-level goals of the business, so the company was eager to make a change.

This is the journey we took to heighten our online traffic, and further increase our brand dominance by way of SEO.

CHALLENGE

The Brave River team has always been dedicated to their clients’ success by offering a helping hand. We wanted to ensure that our website would provide the utmost helpfulness to our viewers, just as our team would do for them in carrying out their business technology needs.

In doing this, our hope was for not only the viewers to understand our company mission, but also for Google to understand it and clearly demonstrate that to potential viewers in need of business technology assistance.

The challenge that BRS was faced with included:

• Increasing quality traffic and leads

• Lowering website bounce rate

• Increasing average session duration

• Ranking higher for “web design” search terms

OBJECTIVES

After carefully outlining the challenges that we hoped to overcome, we began to brainstorm and research which methods would be best for our company to combat these difficulties.

The main objectives included:

• Running an audit to find anything simple to fix throughout the website

• Fixing anything that affected/could possible affect the user or crawler experience

Our prediction for running an audit and searching for simple fixes to enhance the online viewing experience was that we would ultimately see a dramatic, positive change in the way that both users and crawlers would interact with our site.

THE BRS AUDIT

For our audit, we sought to optimize our site on both a technical and structural level while also enhancing our content and keywords.

Technical Optimizations

Our technical enhancements would allow for search engines to fully comprehend what our site is all about, from text to images—the opportunities were plentiful, and these are the improvements we chose to explore:

• Searching for instances of duplicate content and employing canonical tags
• Scanning for duplicate meta-descriptions, and ensuring that each is unique
• Looking for 4XX and 5XX errors
• Fixing broken links
• Confirming our design was responsive/mobile friendly
• Improving page-load-time and website speed
• Making everything asynchronous
• Optimizing image sizes
• Google “fetch and render”
  • Fetch and render allows you to see similarly to what a bot sees when crawling your web pages, including any errors that you may have missed or what you’ve done well with.
• Create xml sitemaps
• Fixing crawl errors
• Adding schema for rich snippets

Structural Optimizations

For structural optimization, we focused in on the overall organization of our site to make sure that our site was as helpful for our viewers as possible, and could be scanned through clearly by crawlers. Reconsidering the arrangement of our site, and thinking about how it could take away from the overall user experience or enjoyability was a top priority—here are a few key factors that we decided to revisit within our site, and our thought processes:

• Looking at website hierarchy
  • Transitioning to a shallow depth navigation structure
  • Incorporating less than 3 clicks for users to navigate throughout the menu
  • Better structure = happier viewers & more effective crawling
• Creating a comprehensive internal linking structure
  • Including clear links for related content to interconnect throughout the site
• Cleaning the structures for URLs
  • A clear, concise URL to keep viewers in-the-know at all times

Content and Keyword Optimizations

Having fully enhanced content is equally as important as having an optimized technical web structure. In order for our site to be helpful to our viewers, our content must be applicable and useful, not filled to the brim with keywords. The SEO game has changed since its inception, and here are some opportunities we pursued:

• Looking for missing or unoptimized title tags and adding/enhancing each
• Optimizing page headers
• Optimizing on-page body text
• Optimizing meta-titles and descriptions
• Optimizing images, including alt text and title tags
• Finding thin content and incorporating additional helpful information
• Optimizing pre-existing blog posts
• Creating new blog posts
• Link Building Optimization
  • Upping our current strategy for gaining new links from industry thought leaders

RESULTS

Our hard work did not go unnoticed. As you can see in the graph below, our traffic dramatically increased within less than a years’ worth of ongoing optimization to our site, along with a few other feats.

Additional accomplishments from our endeavors included:

Overall

Organic

Keywords

TAKE-AWAYS

Our final take-aways from our journey are thoughtful, and will not only help us, but could help you see the potential that optimizing your own website could have for your business.

• You can see through our endeavors how significant of impact organic traffic has on the overall traffic of your site.
• By optimizing our service pages, BRS now ranks higher than ever before, outperforming our competition.
• Adding links to related services as well as blog posts allows for a better user experience and higher click-through-rate.
• Reoptimizing and social posting old blog articles brings increased traffic and improves you’re your website’s organic rankings.
• Using a bimonthly approach within blog article creation allows us to create high quality posts which not only rank higher, but create a more captivating user experience.
• Adding small pop-ups to services pages that relate to our blog articles increases conversion rates and lead generation.
• Adding a chat bot improves the user experience by personalizing and connecting individually with any given
• Adding a chat bot to the website in place of on-page contact forms not only offers an instantaneous opportunity for users to obtain additional information, but also incorporates the potential to foster a relationship and connect with each unique individual.

CONCLUSION

You, too, can achieve your goals such as us. We were experiencing a problem with gaining quality leads and higher volumes of traffic, despite our valiant work ethic and history of exceptional service. Our team worked together to devise a complete SEO plan, and ultimately received even greater results than imagined.

SEO is not a situational technique, so we will be continuing to push the boundaries in seeking new ways to enhance our site—and we want to share this with you.

If your business could use assistance in achieving your SEO goals, the Brave River team is armed and ready to help you conquer the SERP and reach new heights—just give our Marketing Team a call at 401-828-6611. Our greatest motivation is helping your business succeed!