Working on larger sites

Pushing my technical SEO ability to their limits, I have worked on a Magento website with over 1 million URLs. Many of these URLs changed on a daily basis due to the nature of the business.

I was able to increase the search visibility of this company site wide.

We had high search volume keywords which had dedicated landing pages.

But the thing I am by far the most proud of here, is that there were thousands of short tail product related keywords. I was able to increase visibility of our entire product range by restructuring the URLs & implementing proper canonicalization. This was in addition to targeting an entirely new set of keywords!

This paid divided when later, we migrated the website to a new CMS. A 1 million page migration wasn't easy, but it was significantly easier than it would have been without my previous work on it.

Site Launches

I have overseen the launch of many successful websites. Some I created myself on Wordpress, BigCommerce or Magento, others I have worked with a wider team to ensure a smooth launch with a solid SEO plan in place. The first B2C e-commerce site I launched was around 2012, at the time of writing its now 2020 and that site is still live and trading and is the backbone for a fairly large business.

Site migrations & modernisation

Though I am a terrible web designer, I know what it takes to make a technically sound website. Couple me with a good designer, top tier developer & a cup of coffee and you have a very competent team.

I have migrated many websites from an older design, to a newer design. Or from an older CMS to a newer one.

But not all CMS are equal. In fact the "best" are not always the best, it depends so much not just on the business, but the people in the business.

A freelance client of mine in the vaping industry had a Magento website, but it was not fit for purpose. Personally I like Magento, but this was a family run business with less technical know how. They ran it all themselves, barely uploaded any products, and did barely any marketing. But they had a winning product.

I migrated their website to BigCommerce & taught them how to use it (It's easy) - I also created some basic Mail Chimp templates and taught them how to use those. The result was a massively streamlined business for them which in turn enabled them to sell so much more online, their sales figures 1 year later were over 10 times what they had with their old setup.

I like this example because they hired me for SEO directly, but I did not see any value in charging them with their current setup. Instead I managed to convince them to go down this route.

They are now primarily an online retailer selling nationwide. When they first met me they sold locally via a small shop.

Link building

I have always enjoyed link building. It's interesting because there is no right way to do it, but lots of wrong ways. All the best link building methods are specific to the business your working with in my opinion, so there can never be a "one size fits all" strategy. Some examples of some link building I have done:

• The charity the Samaritans ensure there is always somebody there, when you need somebody. It's an amazing charity I was able to work on a project and use a sizeable amount of our marketing budget to help them. As a result their website linked to ours, and a few newspapers picked up what we did for them and published their own takes, some included branded links to us too!

• Secured links on leading technology manufacturers websites such as Jabra, Sennheiser & Sony.

• Secured links on educational sites by creating educational assets in relation to my clients and providing them free of charge

• I have hosted events that gained links from multiple local businesses

• Online trade magazines, newspapers & more

• Followed our companies sales team to an event. Set up local adverts via social targeting the location of the event and used images of our team and directions for where to find out team with some great CTAs. I got to relax all day and see if my PPC efforts paid off. They did and I repeated this for every conference or event our sales team attended (though unfortunately I didn't always go myself as I had nothing to do there!)

• Worked on several E-Commerce AdWords accounts, setting up Google shopping and advising the business how to best improve their website for e-commerce

• Over £100m spent on AdWords as of 2020 accounts while I have been working on them.

• Shopping campaign manual setup (but forget that, use FeedOptimise!)