The client
Curran Daly + Associates is an executive recruitment firm based in Manila, with affiliate offices in Sydney and Hong Kong, headhunting top talent across the region. They came to us to boost their blogging, but the real problem ran deeper.
The challenge
Our content and website audit found the website itself was holding everything back:
- Blocked from search: none of the pages or posts were indexed. The site was blocking search-engine crawlers, so no organic traffic came in.
- Outdated design and poor UX: deprecated sections, broken links, text bleeding out of the viewport, and exit points that pushed users away.
- Painfully slow: the site took over ten seconds to load, against an ideal of two to five.
- Vague messaging: the old hero never told visitors, or Google, what the company actually did.
- Unstructured content: blog posts were not organized into topic clusters, so search engines struggled to crawl them.
Continuing to blog without fixing these would only have wasted time and money.
Our approach
We rebuilt the website first, then ran a focused SEO and content program on top of it.
A modern, technically sound website
A clear design language, better copy, a sound content hierarchy and an enterprise-grade build on top-tier cloud hosting, across two design iterations as the brand matured.
A hub-and-spoke content strategy
Topic clusters around valuable keywords, starting with two premium SEO articles a month, then four, later adding infographics, micrographics, eBooks and editorial pieces. Older content was refreshed for quick wins.
A moderate, white-hat SEO campaign
Ongoing technical SEO, a keyword strategy that maps search terms to landing pages by volume, intent and business value, and a focused effort to earn links from high-authority sites.
The results
Visibility went from nothing to a 36.82% share against the top 20 competitors, and the website became a steady source of qualified leads.
- Featured snippets and rising authority: refreshed articles climbed to featured-snippet positions, and domain rating kept climbing on a tight budget.
- A landmark deal: a billion-dollar company in Singapore found a cornerstone article, inquired, and became a client.
Key insights
Three lessons from this engagement that carry over to most service businesses.
- Give every article a job: topic clusters made the blog easier to crawl and tied each post to a page that converts.
- Refresh before you rewrite: updating older articles was the quickest route to featured snippets.
