Opening Hours UK Case Study – seo.co.uk

Today I wanted to share some details on an impressive case study for a client that we’ve been helping since October 2014 – Opening Hours UK. Just to give you a bit of a background about Opening Hours UK, they are a free, public source of information on public retail stores, restaurants, gyms, libraries, etc. including their opening times, locations, and so on. The website is monetised by either having Google Ads running on the side, allowing money to be made from ad clicks and impressions, or by giving companies the option to advertise directly on the site with a “Premium Listing” for just £4.99 per month.

We can see from the screenshot below showing keyword rankings over time, that when the client joined us, the site was only ranking for approximately 6,371 keywords, of which 1926 of them were on page one.

In January, you can see that the site is now ranking for a total of 12,957 keywords, of which 3,439 are on page one (see picture below). This is a great improvement of around 90% which hit the client as planned, and we are predicted to hit the next organic boost for this client in March.

However, I always say that rankings are by no means the only way to judge your SEO performance. Whichever way you look at it, the key here ultimately is traffic, so I’ll show you how Opening Hours UK performed with only looking at their daily organic traffic.

You can see that when we started, during a peak period of a week in October, the maximum number of (organic only) hits they got in one day was 2,526. Putting aside the seasonal peak in December (when everyone wants to check stores’opening times), which was incredibly well timed with the performance of our SEO campaign, and was what the client was hoping for when we were chosen to spearhead this project, the weekly peaks now easily surpass any regular peak that Opening Hours UK had before. In fact, current daily traffic levels are almost doubled with 5,724 visits on Sunday the 8th of February

In terms of what we’re doing for this client, it’s pretty much the whole deal, on page SEO – advising the client on website structure, making recommendations for how content should be structured on landing pages, fixing errors on the site, off page SEO – building links from great, reputable, relevant websites, and trying to keep the link to referring domain ratio as healthy as possible; look at the picture below for more information:

Notice how the referring domains are gradually and steadily increasing, while the number of links pointing from these domains are up and down; this is due to us taking down links that seem spammy as well as them naturally dropping off by themselves due to their temperamental unstable nature, and are being replaced at a higher rate with a healthy variety of different domains/websites.

To summarise, Opening Hours UK has been a great example of how implementing a mix of all the correct and recommended SEO practices can have fantastic affects on a website’s organic performance. The momentum at which Opening Hours UK is improving is still increasing, and we are predicting that in 12 months time, the weekly traffic peaks should be of the same calibre as what was seen this past December. This is not to mention the new heights that should also technically be achieved this coming December.