Presentation on my personal experiences working on two large projects - BookAnAd, a small-ad booking service and Lawyerly, a legal services directory. In-depth analysis of the strategies and processes involved in SEO and PPC to achieve brilliant results.

1. BOOK AN AD AND
LAWYERLY
Two Challenges Faced HeadOn

2. OVERVIEW
 Professional Experience
 BookAnAd.com
Background
Remit
Technical Considerations
Application
Results
Lawyerly.co.uk
Project Outline
SEO on a Shoestring
Making Content Work Harder
PPC as SEO
Optimising for the Funnel
Wins and Losses

3. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Started freelancing in 2004 for print and web
2 years experience in-agency
Extensive knowledge of technical aspects of SEO
Passionate content marketer
Natural leader, confident advocate

4. BOOKANAD.COM BACKGROUND
Owned by Trinity Mirror Group
Designed as an easy, low-contact way for the public to book “small ads”
(announcements, obituaries and classifieds)
Service not performing to expectations
Redesign undertaken by RippleEffect
Brought in to advise on and execute on-site SEO strategy

5. BOOKANAD.COM - REMIT
Work within the confines of existing CMS to optimise content for search
Advise on potential future problems
Advise on UI/UX considerations for phase 2 of redesign
Advise teams inside and outside the business on aspects of SEO they
should keep in mind

6. BOOKANAD.COM –
TECHNICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
Custom CMS, meaning conventional wisdom doesn’t necessarily apply
Direct editing of the code will often result in “breaking” the CMS’s logical
flow
Vast site with around 300 pages of content
Nearly all of this content is duplicated to some extent or another
Client very specific in requirements – each region, city and publication
requires its own discrete page
CMS not designed to work with semantic search or asynchronous loading

7. BOOKANAD - APPLICATION
Getting clever with infrastructure
Kept search engine landing pages in root
Moved publication-specific pages to their own directory
Moved regions to their own directories, with cities/towns/villages etc sitting beneath them
Canonicalization
More information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Essentially tells the search engine “when crawling site, these pages contain content
equivalent to the named page”
Set the canonical page for each city/town as their overriding region

8. BOOKANAD – APPLICATION
(CONT.)
Robots
Robots.txt tells the search engines which pages to crawl
With the proper rules written it’s possible to exclude individual pages, directories or entire
sites
Wrote a rule which excluded all publication pages
SEO Impact!
Allowed access to location pages – thanks to canonicalization, only the overarching region
page is indexed
This effectively shifted focus away from the “guts” of the site and onto high-quality, relevant
landing pages

9. BOOKANAD – APPLICATION
(CONT.)
Sundries
Extensive content rewrite to shift away from “keyword stuffing” style of previous site to a
more natural, user-friendly style
Landing page optimisations for loading time and user pathing
Widgetised certain elements to allow quick and easy content shifts
Rolled out new structure and concepts to Head of Online Sales Channel and his team

10. BOOKANAD - RESULTS
Prior to relaunch, site was breaking £600k PA
Post relaunch, site achieved over £1.5m in 6 months
Conversions up from 7 day average of 40 to ca. 95
Results accurate as of November 2012

11. LAWYERLY – PROJECT
OUTLINE
Work together with Design and Development heads to create an easy to
use legal services directory
Must provide a foolproof user experience
Optimised for two funnels – B2B and B2C
Manage and analyse PPC campaigns to support product
Generate traffic through content and social channels

12. LAWYERLY – SEO ON A
SHOESTRING
Proof positive that good SEO doesn’t need to cost the earth!
That being said…
No budget for tools
No budget for content support
No budget for PPC outside of £1000pcm for AdWords
No budget for additional staff or freelancers
 If SEO were a video game, this is playing on Hard Mode

13. LAWYERLY – MAKING
CONTENT WORK HARDER
Press releases distributed to around 30 relevant publications and
institutions in our niche
Overall earned us around 100 backlinks post-syndication
Highlights included Liverpool John Moores Business Dept, a 400 word piece in the
Liverpool Daily Post, Legal & Litigation Futures
Excellent example of “evergreen content” – these backlinks boost our SERP ranking overall
long term, and the effects will be felt for as long as the link remains valid
Email-based Content Marketing Plan
Extensive content-style marketing plan implemented, giving away free advice and articles
for those subscribed to our mailing list
Strategy kept traffic at an acceptable base-level for several months while product was
refined

14. LAWYERLY – PPC AS SEO
Offsite SEO is a long-term set of strategies designed for sustainability
PPC offers the potential for quick short-term gains and theory testing
Pushing for maximum value from our budget
Optimised campaign for impressions over referrals
Paid close attention to high traffic vs. low traffic time periods and adjusted bidding
accordingly
Playing the system
Abusing the “scheduled ads” feature
Abusing geolocation
Getting results

15. LAWYERLY – OPTIMISING
FOR THE FUNNEL
Touch the user at the first stage of enquiry
Appear as high as possible within AdWords rankings for generic term “solicitor”
Rationale – Low intent, less likely to convert, though still possibly of interest – Touch 1
Appear as high as possible within AdWords results for “solicitor+LOCATION”
Rationale – User actively searching for a solicitor in their area. Higher intent. Logical flow from initial broad search –
Touch 2
Deliver a content or broad region page for term “solicitor+LOCATION” in organic results
Rationale – Now establishing ourselves as a player and relevant voice in the field – Touch 3
Deliver a city or town specific page within organic results for long-tail keyphrases –
“SPECIALISATION+solicitor+LOCATION”
Rationale – Highest intent. This user is actively searching for a lawyer. A conversion here is more valuable to us than
one further up the funnel as this user is nearly guaranteed to use our service – Touch 4
Bonus Touch 5 – Social Media
Company branded Facebook and Twitter accounts engaging in conversations with potential B2B and B2C clients

16. LAWYERLY – WINS AND
LOSSES
Wins
Built the site from zero to 1500 uniques per week at peak
Gained deeper insight into and knowledge of B2C experience
Forced me to think creatively about marketing problems instead of relying on budget
Losses
Wastage while optimising PPC strategy
Having to choose a focus
Another permanent staff member could have resulted in bigger gains – sometimes you have
to spend money to make it
Ultimately, our B2C strategy wasn’t backed by a solid B2B strategy/model meaning we had
a well-trafficked but unprofitable site