June 2016 – Dec 2017

The Client

The Need

Broadview Networks had historically relied on a large sales team to generate leads for the business, and their website was set up to help representatives walk prospective clients through on the phone. They needed to optimize their website for Google, gain a significant amount of backlinks, and improve their desired keywords rankings.

The competition was tough — I was up against the likes of Ooma and RingCentral. Specifically, Broadview wanted to rank for “office phone systems,” “conference phone systems,” and later, “UCaaS.”

The Work

Technical Site Audit

Like many neglected corporate websites, Broadview Networks was riddled with technical SEO errors. I crawled the site with Screaming Frog and SEMRush, then got to work fixing problems.

Up first, I found that their dev team had redirected the HTTP version of their site to HTTPS via 302 redirects — Google specifically notes that 301 redirects should be used for permanent site moves, not 302 redirects (which are temporary). They also had hundreds of 404 errors (broken pages) on their site, so I wrote redirect rules and sent those to their dev team to implement.

Site speed was also an issue, so I resized each image on their website; we wanted each image to be as small as possible without looking blurry.

I also implemented schema markup on their website using JSON-LD. I also used schema markup to get their review stars to show in the SERPs.

Internal Link Audit

Google uses internal links to determine a website’s hierarchy and the individual meaning of pages, and proper internal linking is incredibly important to SEO. In Broadview’s case, they had a number of internal links with the anchor text “office phone systems,” but those links were pointing to different pages all over the site. I had to crawl the site for every instance of a link with “office phone systems” anchor text, and change those links to point to one page only — the office phone systems landing page.

I followed the same procedure for every other important keyword on the website, and by the end, Google had a clear picture of the site’s hierarchy. 

Content Audit and On-Site Optimization

First, I crawled the site in Screaming Frog to identify pages with fewer than 500 words – in a competitive niche, low content pages won’t rank on Google. I started by adding several hundred words to the homepage, then moved on to other “money” pages on the site.

I also refreshed our keyword research so I could make sure every semantically related keyword was present on our pages (on the conference phone page, for instance, I added the popular term “spider phone” – our keyword rankings improved overnight).

Off-Site SEO Campaign

The link-building stage took several steps:

• Broadview had a number of links from other sites pointing to pages that no longer existed. I reached out to those webmasters and requested that the links be changed to Broadview’s homepage.
• I found unlinked mentions of Broadview’s brand name on a number of websites and requested that links be added to those mentions.
• I used HARO to get Broadview networks quoted by several journalists and writers – these mentions included links.
• I wrote a number of guest articles on high value sites.
• Along with a graphic designer I developed an infographic for Broadview. I then “shopped” this infographic around to about 200 journalists, and we landed links in Business Insider, the Washington Post, and more.

Results

After several months of work, I landed Broadview Networks at #6 on Google for their most valuable search term – “Office Phone Systems.” We also peaked at #8 for “Conference Phones,” and we landed at #10 for “Unified Communications.”