SEO Case study of iSmart Group Ltd. All the SEO (On-Page and Off-Page) activities performed on iSmartsolutions.co.uk site

1. SEO Case Study
For iSmart Solutions
The document presents the on-page and off-page
activity performed over ismartsolutions.co.uk site.
NEERAJ MODANI
25/06/2013

2. Introduction to iSmart Group Ltd
iSmart Solutions is a part of iSmart Group Ltd. The company is based in the city of
Northampton, UK. iSmart Group specialises in different sectors such as Claims, Debt
Management, Food Delivery Services and Recruitment Consultancy. The company is mainly
engaged in PPI Claims (Payment Protection Insurance) under iSmart Consumer Solutions
with its website ismartsolutions.co.uk.
iSmart Consumer Solutions is a leading Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) claims
company, having helped thousands of customer reclaim mis-sold PPI cover. The company
also focuses on will writing services.
http://ismartsolutions.co.uk is the operating website for iSmart Consumer Solutions where
the customers/clients can fill in online application form as well as check his application status
and also pay his invoice online.
Website Analysis – SEO Perspective
Ismartsolutions.co.uk currently has Google PageRank of 5 and has global Alexa Rank as
1402722 and UK Alexa Rank as 149052. It takes 0.72 seconds for the homepage to load.
The website “with” and “without” www redirects to the same page. Redirecting requests from
a non-preferred website is important because search engines consider URLs with and
without www as different websites. Header tag: Header tag is present. The website is
structured using HTML heading (<H1>to <H6>). Use important keywords in headings.
Social media plays an important role in SEO, but as iSmart Solutions belongs to the financial
sector, it does not allow too much interaction on the social media. Social media plays a
negative role in this sector as too many negative comments and reviews are posted. But, the
use of social media can be used in different manner to promote the website.
SEO plays in three main sections for any given website - On-Page, Off-Page and Keyword
Research. Keyword research is the key activity in support of On-Page and Off-Page
activity. On-Page optimization refers to the optimization process done within the website.
On-page optimization is related directly to the content and structure of the website. On-Page
has many factors to consider, some of them are as follows:
 Title tag: A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of particular page
is.
Meta tag: Meta tags contain information about a website.
Web Content: The content of the website should produce a clear message to its visitors, if
they fail to understand it, then they will never come back to the website.
URL: The URL can be designed in two ways, URL can be formed with the brand name in it
or it can be designed with the help of keywords.

3. Off-Page Optimization refers to the improvement of the business website with the help of
third party websites. The main activity of Off-Page activity is to generate back links towards
the home website. Back links acts as recommendations from third party sites and act as an
important factor for getting better result on search results. There are different ways to get
backlinks; some of them are as under:
 Guest blogs: Guest bloggers are someone who post the blogs on the blog site which
not own by them.
 Citation: Citation is the mention of the business name and address on websites such
as Yellow Pages.
 Web Directories: Web directories are the directories that organizes link under various
categories and sub-categories. The use of some most popular web directories such
as Dmoz, Yahoo, etc. can be very helpful to gain backlinks for the website.
Keyword Research for ismartsolutions.co.uk
Keyword research was done with the help of Google AdWords Tool. The main factors
considered for keyword research were – relevance, competition, monthly local searches
(exact and broad). 38 keywords were selected for the purpose of SEO and PPC. List of
keywords were as follows with broad search only:
Sr.No. Keywords
Competitio
n
Global
Searches
Local
searches
1 ppi High 2240000 1000000
2 ppi claims High 246000 246000
3 ppi reclaim High 135000 110000
4 payment protection insurance High 40500 33100
5 mis sold ppi High 33100 33100
6 ppi claim High 368000 368000
7 claim back ppi High 40500 40500
8
payment protection insurance
claims High 4400 3600
9 reclaim ppi High 135000 110000
10 unemployment insurance Medium 550000 27100
11 claiming back ppi High 8100 8100
12 what is ppi High 2240000 1000000
13 payment protection High 74000 49500
14 mis sold High 74000 60500
15 missold ppi High 27100 27100
16 ppi refund High 14800 14800
17 credit card protection High 22200 6600
18 ppi insurance High 14800 12100
19 how to claim ppi High 368000 368000

4. 20 claim ppi High 368000 368000
21 payment protection claims High 6600 5400
22 mis sold payment protection High 3600 2900
23 ppi compensation High 8100 6600
24 ppi refunds High 5400 4400
25 ppi mis selling High 33100 27100
26 claiming ppi High 18100 18100
27 ppi complaints High 110000 110000
28 loan protection insurance High 3600 1000
29 ppi claims uk High 3600 3600
30 ppi claims company High 12100 12100
31 ppi news High 2900 2400
32 ppi insurance claims High 1900 1600
33
mis sold payment protection
insurance High 2400 1900
34
missold payment protection
insurance High 1600 1600
35 payment protection insurance claim High 6600 5400
36 mis sold ppi claims High 1600 1300
37 ppi claims companies High 9900 9900
38 what is ppi claims High 246000 246000
On-Page Optimization
The website was not well optimized. The structure of the website was completely changed
from Title to Meta description to content to internal link building.
 URLs:
- Some of the URLs present on the website were not in normalised form. So, it was an
important task to normalise all the URLs.
- It was also important to remove the pages which were not active but still present on
the site and putting the permanent redirects to the old URLs and updating the
sitemap.
- Removing duplicate pages with similar URLs (some with and without “/”) and keeping
the URLs consistent throughout the site.
- Some of the pages were moved from one directory to other directory and changing
the URLs for the respective pages along with putting 301 redirects from the old URLs
to the new URLs is also an important task.
- Putting breadcrumbs to the pages as per the URL of the page.

5.  Title and Meta Description:
- Unique title was provided for every page of the website.
- Unique and appropriate Meta descriptions along with proper keywords were assigned
to every page of the website.
 Content:
- Adding content to the blog page every 10 days and promoting it on the social media
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
- Updating the content of different pages as and when required.
- Removing duplicate content from the website.
- Moving the documents (PDFs) to proper directories
 Other:
- Removing the errors and warnings from the code of the website to make it error free
site.
- Updating the Alt text for the images present on the website
- Creating new links to the pages (on the study of the clicks with Heat mapping)
Off-Page Optimization
The website was managed by iProspect, UK for its off-page activities. During the tenure of
iProspect, many spam links were created and Google penalized the website for not following
the guidelines. The foremost important activity was to remove the spam links from the
website. Following are the activities performed to remove the spam links with the help of
iProspect.
 Contacting webmaster: Contacting webmasters of the site where the content was
published and requested them to remove the links as well as content from their
website.
 Manually checking all the links and looking for – relevance, Google PageRank and
Site Authority. If all the three factors were satisfactory, then the site was not
considered to be spam.
 Web directories were also used to get backlinks. Some of the most irrelevant web
directories were also used. It was important to remove the links from the web
directories.
 Disavow tool was also used to remove the links/content from the sites where
webmasters did not approved to remove them from their site.
 4 reconsideration requests were submitted to Google. We also requested Google to
provide us with examples for which Google has declined the reconsideration
requests for the first 3 times. As the company was closing down, they told to us to
stop all the activities performing on the sites.

6. While working on the spam links issue, a new off-page optimization strategy was designed
and activity of creating backlink was started again to support the website. On one hand,
backlinks were removed as they were spam, so it was necessary to create new backlinks to
balance the number of backlinks coming towards the website. Following is the Link building
strategy used to generate backlinks for the website.
 Posting blogs on Guest blog sites: Guest bloggers are someone who posts an article
on a blog that is not their own. The incentive for doing so is getting back-links to their
website. It is important to search for the guest blogging sites related to the sector the
company belongs to, which makes sense to the readers.
Out of the selected blog sites, the highlighted blogs were selected blogs for guest
blogging.
 Press release: Press releases are performed on regular basis. Using press release
platform will help to get links from high authority sites.
List of Guest Blogs
Sr.
No. Guest blog site Comment
1 http://startinvestingmoney.com/
2 http://epicafinance.com
3 http://financialhighway.com
4 http://financeandloans.biz
5 http://investmentyogi.com
6 http://www.click4personalfinance.com
7 http://www.frugalfinance.co.uk
8 http://www.financialsense.com
9 http://www.financiallypoor.com/
10 http://www.comparelogbookloans.co.uk/
11 http://www.investorguide.com/
12 http://www.investopedia.com
13 http://www.moneyunder30.com
14 http://www.money-adviser.co.uk/
15 http://www.moneytip.co.uk/
16 http://www.smartonmoney.com
17 http://www.seniormoneymemos.com
18 http://www.savingadvice.com
19 http://yourfamilyfinances.com/
20 http://www.youngmoney.com/
21 http://www.topfinanceblog.com/

7.  Citation: Citation is the mention of the business name and address on other web
pages, such as Yellow pages or Business directories. Even if it doesn’t bring any
traffic towards the website, these websites has high authority which can be helpful in
terms of back-linking. In the current period, citation is the key component of the
ranking algorithms of major search engines. Businesses with greater number of
citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations. Yell.com,
Gumtree, Yelp.co.uk, Bing yellow pages, uk.getlisted.org are some of the examples
where we can put the business information. Yearly membership is required to
register our business on these websites.
List of Yellow pages websites
Sr.No Company Website Comment
1
Hibu
Business
Yell.com
2 Gum Tree
http://www.gumtreemedia.co.uk/display-
advertising/
3 Yelp yelp.co.uk
4
Kcom Group
PLC
http://www.colourpages.com £20/month
5
Thompson
Directories http://www.thomsonlocal.com
6 192.com
Currently,
we are
present on
it
7 Yahoo! http://uk.search.yahoo.com/yp
8
Enable Media
Ltd. http://www.scoot.co.uk/
9 Infoserve Ltd http://www.cityvisitor.co.uk
10 Google
Google Places/
www.maps.google.co.uk
Currently,
we are
present on
it, but
wrong
address is
provided
11
The Number
UK Ltd
http://www.118.com
Currently,
we are
present on
it
12 Bing http://www.bing.com/local/
13 http://www.topix.com
14
Zoom
Information
zoominfo.com
Currently,
we are
present on
it
15
business.com
media
business.com

8.  Use of Web directories: Web directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It lists
websites by category and subcategory. Web directories with high authority should be
used. Use of local web directories can be very helpful. Yahoo, Bing, Dmoz as well as
industry focused directories can be used.
 Sharing the blog page: On the blog page of the home site, Facebook share button
should be provided. This can help to share the content of the blog and can be helpful
in getting many back-links. If it goes viral over the social media platform, it can help
to get quality back-links easily.
 Info-graphics: Sharing of info-graphics on different sites will help to get permanent
back-links towards the website.
The on-page and off-page activities were performed simultaneously on the site. The on-page
activity helped the website to come in proper structure. All the required on-site factors were
performed to make it good navigational site from visitor point of view.
The off-page activity were just in progress, but were stopped after the instructions received
from the management to stop all the activities over the website due to company close down.
List of Infographic sites
Sr.No Site
Fees (iF
any)
1 Pinterest.com Free
2 http://nfogfx.com Free
3 http://infographicsite.com -
4 http://infographicsbin.tumblr.com/ Free
5 http://infographipedia.com -
6 http://visual.ly/ -
7 reddit.com -
8 http://www.nerdgraph.com/ Free
9 http://www.infographicfile.com -