This article covers one of my first experiences of working with a large international business, in updating a page one ranking blog. For scale, this blog had over 20 sub sections which each in turn were worthy of being called a blog in their own right. When copied to Microsoft Word, it contained 90 A4 pages. Thankfully, it was comprised of over 20 HTML anchors which broke up the content. The task, was to update all the statistics, remove duplicate information and refresh the content, all without affecting the SEO position rankings the credit lender held. Usually I ask businesses if they know the keywords they wish to rank for and if not, offer to look for how their customers would look for products or services based on what the business provides. In this case they already had some understanding of SEO and this was provided for me.
Approaching this required a strict methodological approach. I needed to ensure that any keywords that were removed were replaced in other sections so as not to affect the keyword density. I took notes on where these were removed and kept a tally of how much after axing some heavily duplicated sections. As the lender wanted to update this in house, I only had a text document to provide to them which prevented me from utilising other on page SEO ideas and back end work and so had to ensure there were slightly more keywords to compensate for this. Further the titles acting as meta descriptions were heavily duplicated.
I fact checked all of the statistics against recent reputable studies, amending, removing or adding where appropriate. I then sought new information that I could include to develop new sections to compensate for the sections that were removed and crafted engaging copy to create this.
As I work with a mix of businesses, who sometimes upload their own blogs, this was not an occasion where I could ensure that image alt text was optimised or anchor text and link relationships. So I optimised the content to be as SEO friendly by ensuring that the headings and opening lines of paragraphs met the search terms they were wishing to rank for. As soon as the blog was as optimised and succinct as it could be, I delivered this to the lender. Their feedback was that it looked great, and it ranked on page one for some time to come! Today, it currently sits near the top of page 2 for their search terms, although page 1 when combined with their brand name. From then, I realised I was in a position to provide services for similar and even larger clients!