I’ve just finished an end of year report for a SEO client, and was delighted to be able to report a 216% rise in visitors to the site who have come from a search engine such as Google.

The reason this was especially impressive, was because the site is in good shape, with top marks from Google for “best practice” and decent marks in all other areas, and due to the schedules of the busy team, we couldn’t do any off page SEO for them all year, and only on-page for 6 months of the year.

So that 216% increase is largely due to technical SEO we did in the months we could touch the site. This included things such as:

  • Ensuring meta descriptions existed, which obviously can make a massive difference with CTR (click through rate). Quite often the description about a page shown in Google pulls from the meta description so you need to make it good!
  • Ensuring pages didn’t have duplicate title tags – you don’t want Google thinking your pages are all the same.
  • Working on speed and general performance – the site was in good shape but 5 years old with lots of video and International features so there was quite a bit of fine tuning to be done.
  • Adding structured data – which in the past has been a nice to have for SEO but we’re increasingly seeing how important it is now a days.

I might only have given performance one line in the list above, but this can actually take a while. We’re always very pragmatic with our speed optimisation work – we don’t spend days and days chasing each fraction of a second as it’s not a good enough ROI for the client – but sorting out old code and WordPress plugins to make them streamlined and efficient can take a while, but – as in this case – really prove worthwhile.

Another massive thing we did was help the client understand what they actually wanted to achieve. Through workshops with their team across multiple continents, we identified the terms – in a very technical biomedical market – that they were aiming to rank for, as well as the audience, which wasn’t obvious. We also then helped them with understanding their competitors – and how these differ in a SEO sense to who they might be in real life – so as to start the project with some benchmarks.

This work highlighted how a lot of what they wanted to rank for wasn’t actually clearly communicated on their website. This would normally be an “easy win” in a SEO project – you tweak some copy on the pages to include the words they actually want people to find them for, and everything lifts. But it’s not easy when there’s lots of regulation and approval required around what can be said. So the changes we’ve been making have only happened very recently (so don’t have much bearing on this years statistics) and slowly, as a very light touch – but we’re looking forward to continuing to chip away at things in 2026, when we’ll also embark on an off-page campaign too.

If you would like a hand with your SEO, or would like your team to have SEO training, please do get in touch, or watch my masterclass on how SEO and GEO (getting found and mentioned by AI) are shaping up in 2026.