SEO strategy for HAL Company: from not indexing to ranking for its own brand

HAL Company is an Argentine business services firm: process outsourcing, business advisors, a partner network in technology, marketing and sales, and a startup program.

A company selling B2B services depends on being found by whoever is looking to outsource, and in early 2017 its site was out of organic search even when people searched for it by name.

The bilingual WordPress site was barely starting to index, and the reasons were cumulative.

• Three chained redirects: to reach any page, with the whole site hanging off an unnecessary subfolder.
• Duplicate content by design: the Spanish home served on two addresses with the same content, and the template had left demo pages indexed.
• Empty metadata: no page with a meta description, and main headings duplicated or outright empty.

Add a slow server and the site was competing against itself before competing against anyone else.

We started with the URL architecture, because as long as the redirect chain existed no content was going to perform.

The work ran through 2017 within an outsourced marketing service.

First, make the site indexable

• Spanish at the root, English in its own folder and a single canonical version of the domain.
• Permanent redirects with no chains, and internal links always pointing to the final address.
• Language tags fixed, analytics and Search Console profiles created and sitemap submitted.

Performance and metadata

• Speed improvements server side and on image weight.
• Rewritten titles, template heading structure and image attributes.
• Link building with outreach based on competitor backlinks.

The keywords, and the copy behind them

• Research with Keyword Planner, density analysis and five competitors, down to 37 final keywords across five service lines.
• Among them outsourcing companies, BPO services, IT outsourcing, marketing and sales plan and startup accelerators.
• Optimized copy for the home and the Marketing and Sales section with its sub pages on sales processes, marketing processes and telesales training.

Architecture and technology

• Bilingual WordPress site with restructured URL architecture.
• Daily position tracking against competitors, with monthly action and analytics reports.

Learn more about SEO strategy.

A site that in February was barely starting to index ranked first for its own brand by June.

Starting point

• 6.5 s load time, 740 KB page weight and PageSpeed at 85%.
• Three chained redirects, duplicated home and demo pages indexed.
• No meta descriptions and duplicated or empty headings.

Results

• 4.0 s load, 550 KB weight and PageSpeed at 89% after the first month, March 2017.
• «hal company» in position 1 to 2 on Google by June 2017.
• 17.7% of sessions from organic search, with 36% bounce against 48% overall.
• 3.04 pages per session on organic against 2.77 on average, February to May 2017.
• 37 keywords defined across five service lines.

Strategic impact

• Organic traffic bounces less and goes deeper than traffic from every other channel.