The ideal situation for any business launching a website, would be to work with a local SEO consultant to have all the fundamental elements in place prior to launch, however most businesses only realise they need an SEO consultant when the search results don’t align with their expectations.
This business had launched the site 1 month prior to official opening and 2 weeks in, they were still not ranking for their business name and worse their London business that has part of the same name was appearing Position 1 together with the Knowledge Panel.
With 2 weeks left to opening they needed Branded search results for their new business and fast.
- Search: Messums Wiltshire
- London gallery appearing in knowledge panel
- London gallery about page appearing position 1
- Actual site appearing position 3 for business name
Knowledge Panel & Branding
The site lacked any references to location apart from the about page. Footer created with gallery name and location details. Art Gallery structured data added site wide.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "ArtGallery",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "Place Farm, Court St",
"addressLocality": "Tisbury",
"addressRegion": "Wiltshire",
"postalCode":"SP3 6LW"
},
"description": "Messums Wiltshire is a pioneering multi-purpose gallery and arts centre",
"name": "Messums Wiltshire",
"telephone": "01747 445042",
"email": "info@messumswiltshire.com",
"url": "http://messumswiltshire.com",
"hasMap" : "https://goo.gl/maps/92YEP4jGSxw",
"logo": "http://messumswiltshire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/messums-logo-sticky.png",
"sameAs" : "https://twitter.com/messumsthebarn",
"sameAS" : " https://www.instagram.com/Messumswiltshire/"
}
}
</script>
Top 20 UK Local business citations were created with a handful of hyper local directories. Because directory listings, even the top ones take a while to be found and indexed by Googlebot, we used a blog post to list all the links to the new citations with fetch and render in search console. Once the page had been indexed we removed. This method had all citations indexed with a few days to spare.
Events played pretty crucial part of the Gallery, not least the opening event and exhibition. Event pages were restructured and structured data applied to each type.
We also used Eventbrite to list upcoming events, 1) additional citation 2) on the off chance we could not get the sites events appearing in Knowledge panel in time.
Results
Two weeks was cutting it a little fine but we managed to have the correct branding appear for the new Gallery in the nick of time. Time line was far too short to have main site with site links appearing position 1, but we at least had the home page appearing and some internal pages together with Knowledge Panel displaying correct events.
Ideally a business should work with an SEO consultant during the development of your website, rather then a mad dash before opening night.