Overview
Box n Go is a storage facility with a twist. The idea is that Box n Go will supply you with moving rooms (boxes that get placed in your backyard) and you fill these moving rooms with your belongings. When you're all packed you can either get these boxes moved to your new residence or they can go into Box n Go's storage facility.

Being a new website, Box n Go wanted to maximise their exposure to the market through a combination of organic SEO and pay-per-click advertising (PPC). They are currently focusing on the Brisbane and Sunshine Coast market and wanted to localise their listing to these areas.

Bruce got his website off to a great start by contributing a lot of copy and articles to his site before he approached me for SEO. There were many 'top ten reasons' and '4 top tips to...' articles he had written. This helped the site by giving content that is useful to users and to the search engines. It also gave us more pages to play with when looking at keyword considerations.

Step 1 - Keyword research
If I'm dealing with a new website one of the first things I will do is conduct some keyword research to find out how competitive the keyword terms I'm targeting will be. I usually do this through the Google Keyword Tool as it's probably the best tool we have for the Australian market at the moment.

For Box n Go I focused on the Brisbane and Sunshine Coast areas when looking at keywords for the site. It's worth mentioning that if you're targeting a particular geographical area and you find there's not many keywords for that area in a keyword tool, simply generalise your keyword and add a geographical  term to the end of it.

For example there were not any hits for:-

portable storage sunshine coast

in the Google keyword tool so I just looked for 'portable storage' and added the major centres in the Sunshine Coast to the end of these keywords.

If you want some more info about keyword research you can go to the keyword research section of SEOhub.

Step 2 - Competitive research
The next step in our SEO analysis is to conduct some competitive research.

Look at the websites for competing terms.
This is pretty straight forward. I simply type in the terms we would like to rank for and take a look at the different websites that rank for these terms.

When I'm researching competitor's websites, I look at:-

1.   the site structure
2.   the title tags of each page (I do this by doing a site: operator in Google. More info about the site: operator)
3.   their incoming links
4.   how many pages they have on the site and how they're themed

After I've done this I can start to formulate how I might approach this particular job. Each SEO job is a little different so what worked for this site may not work for the next.

Step 3 - Start SEO
So now that I've gotten a picture of keywords and how much competition we face, it's time to start SEOifying the website.

Title tags
For Box n Go I re-wrote a majority of the title tags to focus on the Brisbane and Sunshine Coast areas. Along with this I also changed them to reflect the service they were offering. One thing I had to take into consideration is that they provide portable storage solutions, however there was also an opportunity for them to gain customers through general storage and removal terms.

These terms came in secondary as I really wanted to focus in on the keyword phrase "portable storage" as this would bring the most amount of targeted traffic which would result in customers. As a new business I thought it pertinent to gain some quick wins and then look at other areas they might be able to gain more market share for.

Previously the title tags for the site looked like this:-

• Home - Box n Go
• storage
• moving
• boxes

We took these types of title tags and really focused in on the geographical areas we were trying to target along with putting more information about the service they provide.

I then changed these title tags to:-

• Portable moving and storage containers: Brisbane & Sunshine Coast
• Portable storage, mobile self storage units: Brisbane & Sunshine Coast
• Looking for removals or moving and storage, Brisbane & Sunshine Coast?
• Moving and packing boxes for Brisbane & Sunshine Coast

As you can see these are more targeted to the geographic area they service along with providing more information about the products and services they offer.

Content
A lot of the content was very well written on this site already (full credit to Bruce!). All that was needed was insertion of keywords and some playing around with different headings at the top of the pages. If you look at the heading of the pages these now tend to focus more on the keywords Box n Go are trying to target as opposed to just being a catchy heading.

For example we changed:-

Moving has never been so easy!

to:-

Mobile self storage and moving has never been so easy!

A minor change but when we focused in on the term 'mobile self storage' for this page (through the use of the title tag and themed content) this helps Google understand what the site is about.

Localisation of content
Where applicable we added suburb names into the content to help with long tail search terms. We didn't want to do this to all the pages on the site as it can look a little untidy, so we just added these to a few of the main pages.

This has helped to get more traffic for localised terms that include suburb names. For example Box n Go currently rank number one in Google for the term Elimbah portable storage and 2nd for the term Chelmer portable storage.

Adding the business to Google Local Results
One of the things we did first of all was to add the Box n Go website to the Google Local Business Centre. For more information about how to add your listing to the Google Local Business Centre, check out our SEOhub article called Using Google local search to get more customers.

Suburb specific pages
One of the strategies I told Box n Go to try was to add suburb specific pages to their site. This will help in localising the content and the theme of the site along with giving more opportunities for different variations of keyword terms. They did this adding pages for Mooloolaba, Marochydore, Nambour etc for the Sunshine Coast and similarly pages for Brisbane.

The end result
We started tracking analytics on 14th July 2008 and for the first 12 days thereafter we saw 85 visitors via 38 keywords being referred through search engines.

One month later: In the last 12 days we have seen a 72% increase in traffic to 146 visitors and keywords double to 75.

This says to me that the keyword scope the site is getting is expanding along with the amount of traffic – interestingly overall site traffic has increased nearly 3 times over the same period and now averages 40 visits per day. It's very early days yet but I would expect to see these numbers get better each month as time goes on.