Overview
Hird Sales invited matm to support a clear objective: improve the volume and quality of organic search traffic to their website and, in doing so, enhance digital lead generation and online quote requests.
Working together, our shared goals were to:
- Enhance the brand power and visibility of the Hird website.
- Increase online sales opportunities and quote requests from organic search.
- Support the sales team with better-qualified digital enquiries.
Ensure the website is working as optimally as possible from both a technical and content perspective.
We believe in a transparent, collaborative approach, working closely with in‑house teams, sharing ideas, tasks, skills and learning so that SEO becomes part of the wider sales and marketing effort – not a stand‑alone activity.
The challenge
Hird Sales operates in a competitive powered access and lifting equipment market, with multiple regional and national businesses competing for the same core search terms. The brief was simple – Improve traffic to our website. Behind this however sits several familiar challenges:
- Mixed visibility for high‑intent service and product keywords.
- Technical issues that could restrict performance, such as page speed, broken links and mobile experience.
- Content that did not always reflect how customers search, or fully showcase specialist products and services.
Our role was to turn this simple brief into a structured SEO and content programme that could deliver measurable growth in organic traffic and engagement.
Our four-stage strategic approach
For Hird Sales, we applied our established four stage strategic approach:
1. Audit – measure first
We work on the principle that if you want something to improve, you should measure it. The audit for Hird Sales included a comprehensive review of:
- Website performance and technical health (including site load speed tests, mobile‑friendly checks, broken links, meta data and load speed improvements).
- Keyword landscape and competitor benchmarking, including keyword research, tracking and identification of content and keyword gaps.
- Backlinks and domain authority, assessing the quality of links, opportunities for new backlinks and identifying any potentially toxic links.
- SSL status and overall site security, ensuring the website is secure and trustworthy.
- Google Analytics data: traffic patterns, top landing pages, bounce rates and user journeys.
- Google Business Profile information and citations, making sure core business details were accurate and up to date.
- Customer journey evaluation, understanding how different user types move through key product and service pages.
The tools we use
To maximise results for Hird Sales, we combined three complementary SEO platforms. Each plays a distinct role in how we audit, plan and refine activity over time.
SEMrush – insight and opportunity finder
SEMrush gives us a deep view of how Hird’s website and competitors perform in search, highlighting where the best opportunities lie.
- Runs detailed technical audits to flag issues like broken links, slow pages and missing meta tags.
- Provides keyword research and competitor analysis, so we can target phrases with strong intent and realistic ranking potential.
- Analyses backlinks to identify valuable links to protect and new link‑building opportunities to pursue.
webKPI – performance and reporting hub
webKPI helps us bring key performance indicators into one place and ensure SEO activity stays aligned with wider marketing and sales goals.
- Connects metrics such as traffic, engagement and keyword ranking, showing how organic search supports business objectives.
- Provides clear dashboards and reports, making it easy to share progress with the Hird team.
- Supports our “measure to improve” principle by tracking the impact of each phase of work over time.
Nightwatch – precise rank and visibility tracking
Nightwatch allows us to monitor search visibility day‑to‑day, so we can quickly see what is working and where to focus next.
- Tracks keyword rankings accurately, including local search performance for priority regions and depots.
- Highlights trends and changes in visibility, helping us react early to opportunities or issues.
- Feeds into our monthly review process so we can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
2. Plan – Align with sales strategy
Planning is crucial: we want digital activity to be aligned with corporate and sales strategies, not running alongside them. For Hird Sales, we created a plan of action from both a technical and content perspective, designed to support short and medium‑term traffic growth and engagement.
The plan included:
- Prioritised technical development – scheduling additional SEO‑focused development, regular technical checks, and fixes to keep speed and site health at a high level.
- Content development roadmap – targeting page improvements, closing competitor content gaps, and supporting regional visibility and depot promotion.
- Activity mapping over the months – starting with technical amends (broken link checks, mobile review, page‑speed improvements) before rolling out content marketing and campaign support.
The activity plan is treated as a live document, reactive to results from the review process and any new opportunities that arise, such as emerging service lines or seasonal demand shifts.
3. Implement – make it happen
With the plan in place, we moved into implementation, focusing on “getting the work plan done” in a structured, measurable way.
Technical and existing content improvements. Key strands of work included:
- Security, coding and page speed improvements, such as minifying CSS and JavaScript, to enhance performance and user experience.
- Mobile responsiveness review and enhancement, ensuring key pages perform well on all devices.
- Backlinking plan, starting with removal or disavowal of toxic links and building new, high‑quality links over time.
- Optimisation of existing content for priority pages: refining keyword use, improving meta descriptions and title tags, strengthening internal linking and ensuring images had appropriate alt tags.
- Conversion rate analysis and journey improvements, adjusting page structure and calls to action to make it easier for visitors to enquire or request quotes.
- Google Business and citation work, ensuring accurate details and supporting local visibility.
New content opportunities
To grow organic reach and authority, we also focused on new content:
- New on‑page content written specifically for SEO improvement, aligned to high‑intent keywords and questions.
- Geo Page activity, piloting campaigns for specific regions or depots where local visibility is critical.
- Competitor content projects, creating content to cover service offerings or topics present on competitor sites but missing from Hird’s.
- Support for social media and, where appropriate, PPC landing pages so that all traffic sources benefit from improved content and structure.
As part of the implementation, we also targeted “Page 2” opportunities – keywords already ranking on page 2 of Google, with the goal of lifting them onto page 1 through technical and content enhancements. This delivers quick wins by unlocking traffic that is close at hand.
4. Review – do more of what works
We worked with the Hird team to implement a robust review process using digital auditing tools and analytics to ensure the SEO plan stayed on track.
The review process included:
- Monthly reporting on keyword rankings, traffic and activity, drawing on Nightwatch, SEMrush and Analytics.
- Regular meetings (online or face‑to‑face) to review performance, discuss insights, and agree next steps.
- Feeding findings back into the live plan so that each month’s activity is informed by actual results, not assumptions.
The guiding principle is simple: do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. When particular pages, topics or tactics deliver strong organic growth and engagement, we extend and replicate them; when activity under-performs, we refine or reallocate effort.
Working together with the Hird team
A central strength of the programme was the way matm and Hird Sales worked together as one integrated team.
- Shared objectives – We began by agreeing SEO and content objectives that clearly supported Hird’s sales and lead‑generation goals.
- Joint planning – Hird’s knowledge of their customers, sectors and products informed our keyword targeting, content topics and messaging.
- Flexible collaboration – We provided a high degree of flexibility, sharing tasks and learning with the internal team so that some activity could be handled in‑house while matm focused on specialist SEO, analytics and optimisation.
This approach ensured that SEO activity always remained relevant to live business priorities and could adapt quickly to change.
Results
Using Google Analytics organic search data, Hird Sales has seen robust, sustained growth in organic traffic over a two‑year period.
Between February 2024 and February 2025, organic search sessions increased by around 60% year on year.
Between February 2025 and February 2026, organic search sessions grew by a further 24% year on year.
Over the full two‑year period from February 2024 to February 2026, organic search traffic has almost doubled, with an overall increase of approximately 98%.
These results show how a structured approach: Audit → Plan → Implement → Review, combined with strong client collaboration and transparent reporting, can turn a simple brief into significant, measurable gains for a specialist B2B business like Hird Sales.
