Case Study: Improve Local Search Rankings Against Competitors

By Gordon Smith on 28-Sep-2017

This week brought some great news to one of our clients. They had been longing to appear in the local pack of Google search results for a specific handful of keyphrases. We did some technical SEO to get them there and this had the delightful side-effect of knocking their number one competitor out of almost all their corresponding search positions! Result!

Local SEO is not rocket salad (haha) but you do need to work through some must-dos if you want to appear in local search results. One of these is Schema.org.

To illustrate this point, here is our search visibility graph for our client's website showing. We installed Schema.org on 20/9/2017 to tell the search engines the exact address of the business and the areas it covered.

The blue line is our client's website and the red line is their competitor. They had been trailing behind their competitor for local keyphrases for quite a while, but as you can see, the roles are quickly reversed. There was an almost instant uplift in search visibility and a corresponding downturn in our competitor's visibility.

We basically stole all their local search positions!

Search visibility after installing Schema.org

What is Schema.org?

Schema.org is a computer language which can be understood by search engines. It can be inserted into web pages to add extra information specifically for search engines' benefit. This data can be almost anything from company names and addresses, to descriptions of events, films, books, items for sale - the list is endless.

The point is that whilst most web pages are a mass of data spread across the page, Schema.org provides a structured, machine-readable version of this data.

This comes in particularly handy for local businesses as Schema.org can be used to pinpoint the really essential data on a web page, such as:

Company name
Address
Phone number
Opening hours
Areas covered
Type of business
Reviews and ratings
Logos and photos
Links to social media pages
And much more

So if your business is local, it makes sense to ensure that adding Schema.org is a top priority. Despite the fact that Schema has been around since 2011, most website still don't use it.

We'll be monitoring our client's website closely over the coming months take any further corrective action necessary.

Case Study: Improve Local Search Rankings Against Competitors

What is Schema.org?

See also