How my ‘step 1’ SEO consulting & implementation package can work for an established brand.

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
• Local SEO: target and provide optimizations (onsite/offsite) for high-volume ‘sf’ searches
• SEO: optimize SEO titles for keywords/branding/click-throughs, overcome all immediate-priority technical issues in the site audit – including a major issue with BiRite’s Robots.txt (issue with an outdated plugin) that cause the entire site to drop in search

The Way Forward

December 2018–January 2019: As a high-end grocery chain that also offers catering services throughout the Bay Area, BiRite is a San Francisco institution – and they have a strong branded search presence to prove it. They came to me looking for an SEO consultant who could identify new organic search opportunities for their different businesses, and liked the fact I could offer them a tailored consulting & implementation approach that an agency couldn’t provide.

SEO agencies can be a great fit for massive e-commerce websites and corporations where high scalability is needed; but they will typically start out businesses at a set monthly retainer, and you don’t always get the “personal touch”: the flexibility or responsiveness to make adjustments on the fly given a specific organic search scenario, rather than a boilerplated checklist of audit tasks. It really depends on the agency (I work with several myself), but I love working with clients like BiRite who understand they need a consulting approach to actually go in and inform their existing digital processes, not just hand off recommendations.

This project was pretty short, just under a month, but I was able to uncover some new opportunity areas around keywords and gave them specific strategy to that end, and also resolved a MAJOR technical issue that came up while I was auditing the site – an old WordPress plugin that hadn’t been updated in some time was causing issues with their Robots.txt file, which correspondingly led to a serious dip in search traffic.

Situations like this are relatively common, and it can be frustrating because technical issues can make the direct results of the onsite & offsite optimizations I do and overall SEO progress a bit murky… but looking at this client’s site four months later, they’ve not only fully recovered from the Robots.txt issue, search impressions (# times viewed in search) are noticeably on the rise since the recovery in January and up about 2,000/day from February–April. When you hire a consultant who doesn’t take a one-sided approach to SEO, you know you will get both a growth-oriented view and also eliminate onsite/technical ‘roadblocks’ – site speed is another common one – in the process.