Shooting High with Southdown Gun Club
We are very excited to announce that the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and development teams at Tudor Lodge Consultants are working with the Southdown Gun Club to improve their online presence and positioning on Google Search. An award-winning gun club and shooting school, the Southdown Gun Club are a very unique client with exciting products on offer.
In addition to their West Sussex shooting club and school, they also have a well-renowned shop known as the ‘Gun Room’ which sells all of the necessary and desired additions for amateur and professional shooters. Southdown Gun Club offer a variety of shooting experiences which includes clay pigeon shooting, skeet shooting, target shooting and some truly unique day experiences such as archery and axe throwing.
However, they approached the team at Tudor Lodge Consultants with the problem that as the premier shooting ground of West Sussex, not enough people and customers have been finding their website and engaging with their offerings. We have therefore devised a comprehensive SEO and technical website strategy which together are already showing signs of progress and the huge potential of the Gun Club and its adjoining shop’s website.
The Challenges Faced
The Southdown Gun Club website, being built on WordPress has a huge degree of potential. However, although the site’s appearance and feel are very good, serving customers superbly, the technical aspects of the website need much work. The website was not being properly crawled and ranked by Google and other search engines and therefore, the Southdown Gun Club were not enjoying the fruits of their success and the huge opportunities for customers to find them.
Moreover, the site was not configured to run and be engaged with via mobile and tablet devices, a now crucial Google ranking factor. The website has also traditionally not been targeting potential and prospective customers by targeting keyword and relevant brand and generic search terms.
What We Are Doing
As a result of the challenges faced by Southdown Gun Club, our team have been working to improve a variety of aspects of the site and its online offerings including:
– How the site is crawled by Google
– Site speed
– Mobile functionality
– Targeting of specifically relevant keywords and search terms
– Improved user experience and user journeys
– Improved site architecture
We initially had a detailed consultation with the client and have now devised their keyword strategy after performing in-depth keyword research and analysis. We have used this information and data to help with our initiation of the implementation of the website’s meta data. The meta data is one of the most important factors for Google as it allows pages and their content to be read, ranked and properly ‘understood,’ allowing for better rankings and positions online.
We have also been working with the development team to improve site speed, which is on the up. Southdown Gun Club are currently enjoying site speeds of 71% for mobile and 95% for desktop. This is a very important factor as it allows easy navigation and better user journeys throughout the site.
Further to this, we are also performing a full audit of images on the site, compressing those that are too large to further increase the site’s speed. Whilst the Southdown Gun Club have an adequate link profile, we have also been required to remove an array of toxic links from the backlink profile of the website and we will be working on an improved and logical strategy of building strong, relevant and clean links that point to the Southdown Gun Club website; acting as a strong trust signal for Google and other search engines of the relevant and importance of the website.
Southdown Gun Club have already at this early stage seen their website achieve top 5 positions on Google for the competitive terms of ‘gun clubs’ and ‘gun club,’ some of the most competitive and most popular search terms in the industry.
We are looking forward to building on the progress and positive outlook for the Southdown Gun Club, takin their site to the lofty heights of Google’s page 1 for further terms.