Meeting Acacia

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Acacia is small branding agency located in East London and more specifically Medway Kent. The brands target clients are mid-sized professional services firms. However, they accept clients which do not belong in this persona due to the inconvenience of the times.

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Acacia used to do business and meets potential clients in business events were there is human interaction or from word of mouth. However due to the pandemic of 2020 the brand could not reach their prospects clients with the ways of the past.

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Their digital footprint consists have a website and 3 social media channels (LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube).  Hence, I offered them an SEO audit, UI-UX analysis and implementations.

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First impression

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While working with them I identified that they did not have any original content for their social channels, minimal engagement and as a result they were unable to link back to their website through content.

Moreover, the website did not have any SEO strategy implementation (keywords, relevant meta description and headers). Hence the website was not searchable, including their own name.

Furthermore, it was not connected to the search engine console and the google analytics was set up but never used.

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UI-UX testing

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In order to get insight on what Acacias website visitors feel and see during their browsing I started running a caveman test, were I interviewed individuals and asked questions regarding looks and expectations.

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The participants agree on most of the points shown below

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• They did not understand what this website is about (just speculate)

• They did not know what is the of the brands target audience

• They felt that the website is unfinished

• They expressed that they would not work with them since they seem untrustworthy

• They got irritated by seeing the same call to action buttons while they did not know where this buttons lead

• They expressed that the brand has potential but their work section is undeveloped

• The colour patterns are visually pleasing but do not support contrast

 

Analytics

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The google analytics highlighted and reinforced the existence of those problems.

It showed that:

• They users do not click the call to action buttons

• There are issues with some pages since there was a 60% visitor drop off in the about page, 80% in the work page and 62 % bounce rate on the homepage.

• The users that read Acacias blogs navigate the through the whole website

• LinkedIn brings a lot of people to the website but they bounce while visitors from YouTube did not.

 

SEO audit-Keyword research

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The SEO audit of the website was made possible with Screaming frog. It was identified that:

• Only 4 out of 16 pages had titles and meta tags but none of them was focused on a SEO strategy or keyword.

• The home page was the only page with keywords. More specifically they were short tailed, high competition keywords (CP= 55-65) such as branding, rebranding and brand transformation.

• Images did not have alt tags.

• Site map was not submitted.

• A total 16 old pages and test pages were visible while they should have been removed.

• All the pages that the brand cared about were indexed and crawled by spiders.

• The page speed was found to be around 6 seconds.

• The website design was not fully optimised for mobile view.

 

The next step was the keyword research. It was launched while having in mind that Acacia offers branding from concept to launch, their target audience is mid-sized professional service firms that operate in London, Acacia is located in Kent (East London) and they specialise in design.

 

For the research of the keywords I used Uber suggests, the extension keywords everywhere, Googles keyword planner, trends and other free tools which suggest and show how people might search on Google, their search volume and how competitive they are.

 

After the keyword individual research and keyword competitor analysis, we the keyword ‘Branding agency design London’ for Acacias homepage. It was chosen since it fits the description and goals of the brand while having a total of 260 monthly searches and a competition level of 13 according to Uber suggest.

 

This research also found other topics related to branding which have low competition and an acceptable search volume for Acacia. These topics are connected to the branding methodology that Acacia mentions briefly on their website.

 

SEO-UI-UX Implementations (completed)

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• Changed the title, meta description and H1 of the homepage according to the new keyword (the title is less than 55 character and meta less than 155 to provide a full description to the user what the website is about).

• Added title meta and H1 to every page (about, contact, projects, blogs, contact) while avoiding cannibalisation.

• Created a new page called Methodology which provides a description for every stage of branding as well as 4 blog articles which are linked from this page while being linked together. These articles were written while having in mind the SEO tactics and the keywords research done (total word count, keyword count and alternative-synonym keyword count is higher than the competitors).

• Refreshed old articles

• Connected the website to the search engine console

• Reimagined and created to different sections on the website such as the scorecard, about us, contact and insights

 

Pending implementations

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My internship with Acacia was 2 months. The SEO, UI and UX research and implementations took 2 weeks. As a result, I did not have the necessary time to finish all the implementations.

Therefore, Acacia stills needs to:

• Add alt tags to their images.

• Add more images to their pages since they are a design agency.

• Recreate the about page since it has a large amount of text which is hard to skim.

• Add written content to their work-project pages since they showcase only images which makes it harder for SEO as well as visitors to understand fully what the project is about.

• Optimise the website for mobile users

• Improve the website speed

 

What the data results show?

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The search engine console was connected to the website at the beginning of June while the SEO implementations were completed in July. Therefore, the following represent the data from June until August.

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• The website managed to achieve a total amount of 1100 impressions with 2.4 CTR and an average position of 34 while previously it had 0.3 CTR and an average position of 67.

• The website article recently created about brand clarity appears 4th in the organic search results according to Search engine console.

• The website appears first for its name ‘Acacia Branding’ (Acacia was completely unsearchable in the past, including their own name).

• Increased total users by 33.4%

• Increased new users by 6.25%

• Increase the session by 1384%

• Reduce the bounce rate by 35% (it currently stands at 31%)

 

Additional implementation to improve the digital footprint of Acacia also includes the development of:

• Additional articles for the website and social media

• Original content for social media

• YouTube videos which originate from the articles written

• Connections with other websites to create back linking