How I helped a Squarespace site climb the ladder in local Google results (+300% impressions), overcoming technical SEO obstacles.

Opportunity

• Business: identify opportunity areas for organic search growth per keyword & competitor analysis, act on specific SEO strategy recommendations ‘as feasible’ as they align with branding/business goals
• SEO:improve organic visibility to new customers in the Portland, OR, market for niche photography searches, increase bookings
• Local SEO: include both SEO strategy & implementation targeting onsite/offsite work that actually works for local businesses in 2020

The Way Forward

March–October 2019: Portland-based photographer Michael Verity also found me on Upwork. I pitched my ‘step 1’ onsite/offsite SEO package, tailored around Squarespace implementation, which would help build local search presence given that he had a couple niche photography specialties and an established brand already to work with.

We were able to successfully work both on the Upwork.com platform and off, and contracted together for two separate “packages”, custom to local search & Squarespace.

What made a lot of sense to both Michael and myself was to divide the package up into steps so that he could see the results as we went along, and I could offer my feedback on what was working (and what wasn’t) at a couple different ‘checkpoints’. This allowed me to respond on the fly to organic performance results in Google Search Console – and helped to diagnose and resolve a technical issue his site had with keyword over-optimization & cannibalization due to having a lot of similarly targeted post URL strings, image filenames & alts, and SEO & H1 titles. (You can see the results of the fix in 2019 of the Search Console screenshot)

All in all, we covered a lot of ground, but there are remaining challenges to improve organic clicks, not just the 300% visibility boost from June-November you can see above. (Getting above-the-fold in local search for additional keyword targets will help.)

Delivering my SEO work in a packaged, implementation-focused, no-long-term-contract round FIRST allows us to build the trust required in complex SEO projects like these.

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