In December 2011, we were asked to work with one of the South-East’s largest house clearance and probate companies, Jeffrey Avery & Associates. The project involved re-designing their CityClearances.com website and helping them to improve their search engine rankings due to the increased competition in their sector.

The project was completed in January 2012 and in as of May 2012, the results for the company have been impressive. Managing Director Jeffrey Avery comments on the impact to his business from commissioning the new website, “Towards the end of 2011, we’d noticed that our usual methods of gaining new customers were generating fewer engines whilst our old website was falling further down the search engine rankings. Obviously this was worrying as our overheads for staff and vehicles are quite high so having them standing idle for any period of time really effects our bottom line.”

Providing the solution for more customers

Having a a great-looking new website is all well and good but utterly pointless if nobody is seeing it so we initially set-up the new website so the content would appeal to their potential customers and the search engines alike. Using the analytic data from their old website, we were able to identify specific key-phrases that used to attract new visitors but had fallen from grace with the search engines.

The next step was to help Jeffrey make his website a real authority within his industry sector. Google in particular have publicly stated that they want to see websites that “offer a depth of great content to enhance the visitor experience”. In short, this means that those older websites that contain only a handful of pages are falling out of favour with the search engines and losing their rank position.

Content is King so be a loyal servant

One element we immediately worked on with the new website was the ability for Jeffrey’s staff to easily add new content to the website so incorporated a WordPress blog to their website. The benefit of regularly adding new content via a WordPress blog is two-fold:

• Firstly, every new blog posts essentially becomes a new page in your website and the search engines give greater authority to websites that are frequently updated with new content and will quickly rank new blog posts, thus providing more traffic-generation channels.
• Secondly, by adding a lot of new content relative to a specific industry you are reinforcing your authority as a highly-relevant website within that sector. The more relative content you add, the more authority your website attains and the search engines will reward that authority with increased rankings (and more visitors to your website).

So what were the results?

Before we started any work with Jeffrey’s website, we bench-marked his old website and at that point, the website received an average of 613 visitors each month. The data from April 2012 shows a total visitor number of 2,797 – that’s an increase of over 450% from the visitor levels of last year.

But what do these numbers mean in real terms? Jeffrey explains how his business has changed in the last six months, “The effect it’s had on our business has been remarkable. I must admit I was a little cynical that the new site would make much difference but it’s actually helped our business in two ways. Obviously the increased traffic to the site has created far more customer enquiries but we’ve also noticed that the quality of the enquiries has increased too. Whether it was intentional or not, the new site seems to appeal to a different class of customer than before so we’re getting work now that we wouldn’t historically have even been considered for.”

Jeffrey went on to comment, “The net result for my business is that we’re on course for our best ever year and we’ve been trading for over three decades. When you consider that we’re supposed to be in recession, the change in our fortunes seems remarkable. I’m not one to dish-out praise very often but I’m prepared to make an exception with Avara who’ve helped us take our business to a whole new level. Considering the amount of ‘Snake Oil Salesmen’ that we spoke to last year, I guess we’re incredibly fortunate that we put our trust in Avara.”

Could your business benefit from our help?

Whilst every business is different, most of them are missing opportunities to grow through Internet Marketing. We do appreciate that it can be incredibly difficult trying to establish who you can trust with the future of your business so we offer all potential new Clients the opportunity to have a free one-hour consultation with us. In these sessions, we help to identify what’s holding a business back and which opportunities are being overlooked. If you’d like to book a free consultation, simply call us on 01252 416 222 or complete our contact form. You’ve nothing to lose but everything to gain.