Imagine a machine where you put one pound in and seven come out. Every time. Sound like fantasy? That’s because it is – but that’s effectively what happened to one of our clients. “How?” I hear you ask. Well, if you must know…
The client in question runs an accountancy firm in London. They are doing well for themselves but that wasn’t always the case.
Rewind two or three years and they weren’t generating any new business. They had three members of staff but were thinking about downsizing – or worse.
They’d tried advertising in trade magazines, at trade shows and in two well-known directories but they just weren’t attracting any new custom. Our man kept his phone on every night in case calls came through from potential clients. He needn’t have bothered.
Things needed to change. Fortunately they did. Our client had a eureka moment while flashing his business card in a butcher’s shop as he paid for his sausages. It wasn’t quite Archimedes in the bath but it proved to be a watershed moment for his company.
He realised his website was the weak link. It wasn’t a bad site but no one knew about it. He got in touch with an SEO agency – us! – and asked us to optimise it for search engines.
It was January 2011. He made a note of the date.
We immediately started blogging with relevant articles and amending the existing content on his site. We needed to drive the right people there – and keep them there. And things started to change within days.
The facts speak for themselves. Before he called us he was getting just over 200 visits every month – most of whom were existing customers. Virtually overnight this rose to nearly 600 – most of whom weren’t.
But don’t take my word for it – see below:-
Getting to the top of the Google rankings – and staying there
Research shows that less than 6% of people who use a search engine bother going to the second page of results. More than twice as many people click on the last position on page 1 than the first position on page 2.
You can imagine how valuable it is to appear on page one of the Google rankings for a phrase as popular as “accountant London”. There are roughly 10,000 accountancy firms in London. It’s the Holy Grail for those firms. Likewise “chartered accountant London” and “London accountants”.
We managed to ensure our client didn’t just get to page one – he got to the number one position. For months. And not just for one phrase. For all three.
Roughly a third of all clicks on search engines tend to be for the first position so it won’t surprise you to learn that his business was transformed after he reached top of the pile for phrases as competitive as these.
He went from getting fewer than one new enquiry a month to five or six new paying customers every week – many of whom are big multinationals hailing from Beijing to Buenos Aires.
Staff numbers have doubled and profits have soared. He’s done the sums – just for fun this time – and he’s made over £7 for every pound he’s given us.
He even gets to turn his phone off after 6pm. And the local butcher can sell his sausages without getting the third degree.
We’ve got plenty of other similar stories to tell. If you’d like to hear them drop us an email on hello@uwpgroup.co.uk – we’d be happy to bend your ear.