SEO in Motion – Raising the ranking of an Animator in London, Robert Grieves

The brief:

Robert Grieves is an award-winning animator, having produced animated projects for brands includings Adidas, the BBC, ITV, British Red Cross, Samsung, RMT, the Natural History Museum, PBS and the 2012 London Olympics ceremony.

We had recently completed a brand new website for Robert, showcasing his excellent work in a more visual way.

Robert wanted to expand his reach by making sure he appeared in key search terms in London and the UK.

What I did:

After researching which keywords we wanted to rank for in Google and analysing the competitors, We focussed on the term ‘animator london’ as it had large amounts of traffic and other known competitors were ranking well there.

I reworked the page’s SEO elements, including headings, alt tags and meta tags, in order to include that search term or close synonyms.

We also made sure any mention of Robert Grieves in press articles and on social media linked back to the website where possible.

We also did have the added benefit that his domain was over 10 years old, which to Google shows his authority and helps rank the page once optimised.

Over the course of the next few months, we shot from somewhere in the depths of 9th page obscurity ranking, all the way to the first page.

See Robert’s email here:

“Just to say:

- Open Google

- Search "animator london”

- Results = first page!

VERY good work Jon. You can be proud.

Now let’s build on this!”

After that, we continued monitoring the site, and slowly we rose to the top spot.

Number one on Google for a competitive city such as London was a great result we were proud of.

Some time passed, and though Robert and I were both happy and he got a few enquiries from the site, we revisited it and decided to change tact.

I explained that maybe a ‘longer-tail’ keyword/phrase would be better.

The general rule for these is that people who are more serious about hiring or buying tend to be more descriptive and specific with their search queries.

We settled on a new focus of ‘freelance animator london’, and a little while after we had reworked the SEO content, we reached the top 5 on the first page again.

Some time on, Robert has recently moved to Sydney for a little while with his family, and our next challenge is hitting these kind of results down under! Stay tuned for a future update.