Project Type
Optimisation for Local Searches
Our Role
Local SEO
Web Design
Location
Cornwall
The Client
Cornwall Merchant Services is a regional payment solutions provider. They offer card payment systems to businesses across Cornwall.
What They Wanted
When Cornwall Merchant Services came to Hedgehog they were seeking help with their lead generation process. They wanted a strategy to gain more qualified leads from clients in Cornwall.
The challenge
1. Cornwall Merchant Services offer payment solutions from Paymentsense. This means that they may be competing in the search engines against branded search terms specific to Paymentsense products.
2. Because Cornwall Merchant Services is a regional business, they need to be found by potential customers in a particular location. Being successfully discovered by local searchers requires a slightly different approach to SEO than national or international searches.
3. Cornwall’s entrepreneurial landscape is unusual, with many micro-businesses operating in the region. The business owners in this region all have their own unique set of needs from their card payment solutions. Cornwall Merchant Services’s digital presence needed to address these needs to gain more leads in the area.
What We Did
To address the challenges faced by Cornwall Merchant Services, we took an in-depth look at their current digital presence to identify gaps and potential areas for improvement.
From this, we were able to identify two key areas for improvement; the design of their website and their local SEO strategy.
Web Design
The original Cornwall Merchant Services website was performing poorly in the search engines and using incredibly restrictive technology.
To deliver on our goal of generating more leads for Cornwall Merchant Services we worked to create an updated website that included strong SEO strategies built-in from the ground up.
As well as being SEO friendly, the updated website needed to be user-friendly. To encourage more visitor conversion into customers, our design team implemented a number of clear call to action buttons throughout the website.
These call to action buttons are a vital tool in encouraging enquiries. Using a prominent button with a clearly identifiable action makes it easy for visitors to understand what action they should take and why.
Presenting the important information contained within the site in a logical and easy to navigate style helps to guide the user throughout the site. By providing a smoother, more frictionless journey throughout the site, we wanted to encourage more conversions from the visitors.
Local SEO
Because users will be coming to the Cornwall Merchant Services site with varying needs and levels of understanding of the process of setting up a card processing system, the website needed to cater to a variety of requirements.
To know which search terms to target with our Local SEO strategy, we needed to gain a thorough understanding of the searches their target audience were already using and the intentions behind these searches.
Understanding the search intent of a target audience is a vital stage of the SEO process. Intent tells us about the wider journey behind a search and what users are expecting to find when they make a particular search.
When we know the intent of the audience we can marry that intent with the content of the site; providing content that offers solutions tailored to the problems of the searcher.
For Cornwall Merchant Services, because they are a regional business, we knew we needed to use location qualifiers in our target keywords.
A location qualifier indicates that a searcher is looking for the answers to their search term to be specific to an indicated region.
To stand out in location-based searches we also needed to optimise Cornwall Merchant Services’s Google My Business profile.
Having a strong Google My Business profile helps a business to stand out among its regional competition and gain a prominent Google My Business listing on the side panel of the search results page.
Our local SEO efforts worked to gain Cornwall Merchant Services more prominence on local searches. Allowing them to be found by a relevant audience; one that is searching for their services within the specific area they operate in.
The results speak for themselves
Within the first three month, we were able to produce a brand new, user-focused website which simply communicated the most important information to visitors.
Designing a cleaner and more streamlined website with more SEO friendly technology has freshened up Cornwall Merchant Services’s presence online, making the entire site easier to navigate and therefore encouraging more leads.
Targeting service-specific keywords with location qualifiers helped to focus in on Cornwall Merchant Services target audience of businesses located in Cornwall seeking the services they provide.
Taking this approach has had a fantastic result for Cornwall Merchant Services. Since we implemented the new Local SEO strategy, their position ranking for our target keywords has improved dramatically.
Keyword | Jan 2020 position | Dec 2019 position |
epos payment cornwall | 1 | 100 |
merchant services cornwall | 1 | 100 |
epos payment system cornwall | 2 | 100 |
online payment system cornwall | 2 | 100 |
ssl integrated payments | 2 | 100 |
epos cornwall | 6 | 100 |
