Search Engine Optimisation for regional services – A case study

We recently created a website for a plumber friend in Australia, and were tasked with optimising the site for search. Our clients in the past being predominantly based in Hong Kong, or aiming for more global audiences with their offering, this was our first taste of local SEO methods, which we describe here.

Regional SEO

A solo plumber services a certain radius from their home or HQ. People looking for plumbers will tend to use a search engine to look for something like “emergency plumber + my town”. So it was important to optimise the website for each town that falls into that catchment area. To cater for this we created unique pages for each area, using semantic content (headings, sub-headings, images with alt text, internal links) to promote it. These pages are linked to in a list in the footer, so that every page of the site has internal linking to those pages.

Choosing a Platform for Search Engine Optimisation

We opted for WordPress as it allows us to develop quickly and cheaply, make changes to content easily, and install various SEO plugins to help with our efforts like Yoast. SEO is an ongoing process of tweaking and measuring, and a content management system like WordPress is perfect for that.

Measuring Success

Google and Bing will give a little information about search engine ranking in their Webmaster Tools services. We monitor search engine position further using automated software. Quite beyond our expectations, our site started indexing for brand terms, and for long-tail terms such as ’emergency plumber mollymook’ within 5 days. Typically indexing at all takes longer than that. Here is a screenshot from our software:

We are pleased with the success so far of this project and other SEO projects we are working on currently. Are you looking to improve visibility in search? Drop us a line so we can help get you moving up.