Situation:

Norfolk Karate Academy was in the process of ramping up for a large offline marketing campaign when the owner realized his online presence seemed to be lacking. Although the business website itself was extremely functional with many customer integration features and loaded with a great deal of rich content, the SERP listings within the three major search engines wasn’t strong.

With the domain name of www.norfolkkarate.com, it was not surprising to see their first position placement on Google for “norfolk karate”. What was surprising, however, was the absence of listing for “hampton roads karate” or “hampton roads jiu jitsu”. The broader metro area is referred to as Hampton Roads.

With the business recently authorized as a “Certified Training Center” in Gracie Jiu Jitsu, it was equally as important to provide broad organic exposure for that service as well. Some success in this area had been achieved. For example, “norfolk jiu jitsu” provided a first position placement. But, the term was simply too narrow for heavier volume of traffic. The broader search terms of “hampton roads jiu jitsu” and “virginia jiu-jitsu” were largely untapped.

Action:

The majority of these poor placement issues for targeted keywords was due to the disjointed nature of the keyword strategy itself. The keyword meta tag list provided some quality keyword direction, but also included many broad search terms that did not provide content relavence, i.e. “newport news” or “virginia”.  Additionally, Google was not indexing many of the internally linked pages due to a circular link structure.  The following actions were taken:

• Researched relavent content, created targeted keyword list based on projected search volume and relavence to competition with high placements.
• Modified Title Tag to include 13 specific of the top producing terms in sentance form
• Modifed sub pages to reflect both Title Tag and relavent content for that sub page.
• Removed all circular references within internal link structure

Additionally, all content was modified to correlate directly with new standard keyword strategy ensuring consistent relavence throughout the site.

Results:

Within two weeks of modifications www.norfolkkarate.com increased its top position listing from 5 to 10.  A doubling of target keywords listed in the very top position.  Additionally, of the 24 targeted keywords, 16 either was either listed in the top 30 for the first time or improved its position from page 2,3 to page 1.  A positive change for over 60% of the target keyword list in less than two weeks!  The following are some of the tracked metrics:

results after first two weeks

Additional results of note included a first page position for “hampton roads martial arts”; a keyword previously not listed on any engine.  Also, Gracie Combatives and Gracie Jiu Jitsu saw improvement as well.  Both of these keywords represent much greater national exposure and will be the focus of the social media campaign.

In summary, for local online presence, drastic impact on organic search results can be made very quickly by simply creating a cohesive and integrated keyword strategy.