SEO Success Story: Hydro Innovations

We’ve been providing our SEO services to Hydro Innovations for nearly a year now, and it’s about time we share the success they’ve seen so far in their SEO journey.

Hydro are actually based in Sydney, but sell their wastewater pumps Australia-wide. This presented two particular keyword challenges:

• It’s generally easier to rank for more niche keywords than it is generic keywords. Since Hydro aren’t interested in ranking for Sydney-related keywords, we are trying to rank for keywords that people would be using no matter where they are in Australia, and these tend to be much more competitive.
• While Hydro sell wastewater pumps, their product offering is actually much more nuanced than that. Their potential customers could be searching for a wide range of keyword phrases with numerous variations that are similar to wastewater pumps but not exactly the same (e.g. sewage pumps, self priming pumps, self priming sewage pumps, centrifugal pumps, self priming centrifugal pumps, gear pumps, grey water pumps, etc).

In other words, we’re trying to get them to rank for more generic, higher competition keywords that have numerous variations. No easy task.

In the early months of working with Hydro Innovations, our team conducted our usual initial SEO tasks like setting up Google Analytics and Search Console, configuring the Yoast SEO plugin, and keyword research.

In April 2018, about 5 months into their SEO program, they proposed a cull to their keyword list in order to focus on the pumps that were most important for them at the moment. Doing so gave us the opportunity to narrow our focus on fewer keywords rather than spread our SEO efforts across too many of them. As a result, Hydro have experienced a steady increase in keyword visibility in the past 6 months:

During this time, we’ve been methodically going through each of their product pages, service pages, and case studies and optimising them based on the updated keyword list. We love when clients come to us with websites that are already full of content: in Hydro’s case, they had plenty of text and images for us to work with.

We expect their keyword visibility to continue to increase as in the chart above as we continue making our way through optimising all of their website pages.

We also recently completed a backlink audit for them, which entailed going through nearly 800 backlinks and either whitelisting them (i.e. marking them as ok), or disavowing them (i.e. telling Google not to count the backlink if it comes from a spammy-looking site). The links to be disavowed we then submitted to the Google Disavow Tool. Going forward, if any of the bad backlinks had a negative impact on Hydro’s keyword rankings, we should start to see an improvement in their keyword visibility as Google processes their disavow list.

Update: a Google featured snippet for “self priming pumps”

By December 2018, Hydro’s keyword visibility had more than doubled in 6 months as we optimised each of their pages and blog posts month by month.

Hydro also reached Position Zero on Google for one of their keyword terms, “self priming pumps”. Also known as a featured snippet, Position Zero is the box that often appears above the search results and answers a search quickly and clearly. Google picks the snippet from pages that already rank well, and not every search has one, so it is hard to plan for directly. The best approach is to keep doing good SEO for positions 1 and down.

We have a few theories about why Hydro’s page was chosen:

• The post directly answers the question what is a self priming pump, which is closely tied to the search for self priming pumps.
• It succinctly explains how self priming pumps work, and explanations of how something works are often used in featured snippets.
• Its subheadings clearly tell Google what the post is about and answer the what, where, why and how.

Read about another client’s featured snippet in our Heat Systems success story.

Rock Solid Marketing provide SEO services and web design services in Mildura and Australia-wide. Contact us for help with your SEO and website.