Callaghan’s of Shrewsbury is a gallery and fine art dealers established over 30 years ago. Nestled in the heart of Shrewsbury, they put on regular exhibitions throughout the year. The gallery showcases a wide range of artworks including 19th and 20th Century fine art, modern British paintings, and contemporary bronze sculpture. A few times a year they head across the pond to exhibit in the USA, with shows in New York, Palm Beach, and Nantucket.
The brief
Our relationship with Callaghan’s goes back quite a while – we’ve been providing web support and PPC advertising since 2013. However, in March 2023, we noticed that organic traffic was looking low, only making up around 22% of their overall sessions. We suggested the site could benefit from some search engine optimisation to help Callaghan’s rank higher on Google, and they were happy to give us the go ahead.
SEO and PPC often go hand in hand, with well-written, search-optimised content leading to a better landing page experience for the ads, and the extra ad traffic helping increase Google’s trust in the site.
Our strategy
The SEO work began with our usual strategy – detailed keyword research, rewriting meta tags, and optimising copy. Sometimes these methods can lead to immediate, significant changes, but, more often than not, SEO is a slower process which needs careful planning and tweaking.
That being said, after not seeing the performance we hoped for initially, we began to suspect something was hampering the results. We began looking for what could be amiss and quickly discovered that a large portion of the site wasn’t findable on Google search results. In technical terms, Google had chosen to remove certain pages from its index.
Google can be quite opaque on why it chooses to de-index a page, but we suspected it was due to some copy that had been previously duplicated across the site. This caused Google to view the pages as duplicates of each other, and de-index the pages it saw as extraneous.
Over the next week we removed or rewrote the copy in question and requested indexing for the pages. The results were immediate!
The results
Keyword position began to rise as soon as we started reindexing the pages. Over the following months, average position increased 18 places as we improved or expanded the copy. This included six new keywords rising to page one of Google search results.
As of Q1 2024, organic traffic is up 27% year on year, and enquiries from this channel have increased 41%.
27%
Increase to organic traffic
41%
Increase in organic enquiries
Let’s chat
Want to take your brand to the next level with an experienced agency that does what they say they’re going to? Get in touch with our team today! We can discuss an upcoming project or simply chat about your business and suggest solutions for growth.
Call us on 01743 344 911, drop us an email or fill out our contact form. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.