Hibernia Steel

// Background 

Hibernia Steel is Ireland’s largest and most successful independent steel supplier. From launching as a supplier with a limited product range, to now offering 15,000 tons of stock and a wide variety of services spanning numerous industries, they have grown from strength to strength.

// The Challenge  

Hibernia Steel and Loud Mouth share the same passion and drive for growth, making us the perfect partners for their digital growth plans. To enable their online expansion, we needed to first overcome some challenges, which included migrating their website to a new domain.  

Our expert SEO team would ensure they had the expert advice needed to achieve their business objectives – and see incremental growth through 2021 and beyond. 

// Objectives

• Increase Average Organic Ranking 
• Increase New Users on Website (already had a pool of existing loyal customers) 
• Increase Sessions on Website 
• Increase Keyword Ranking Pool – From Top 100 to Top 10 

// Services Offered  

• Technical SEO
• On Page & Off Page SEO 
• Content Optimisation 
• Backlink Profile  
• Competitor Research 

// Our Approach 

SEO is never an instant fix; it takes time and expertise to make changes that will have a long-lasting impact. Our award-winning team always stay up to date with the latest Google and Bing updates to ensure we can smash our clients' objectives out the park and stay ahead of the curve. For Hibernia Steel, our approach involved a three phase roll out: 

• Phase 1 – Comprehensive SEO Audit  
• Phase 2 – Keyword Research & Content Optimisation 
• Phase 3 – Backlinks & Citations 

Phase 1 – Comprehensive SEO Audit

To ensure we achieved long-term goals for Hibernia Steel, we needed to fully understand how the website had been set up and identify what was going on in the background. We took a deep dive into auditing the site and developed a list of recommendations which we shared with Hibernia Steel and their developers.  

We looked into areas such as: 

• Ensuring the navigation and architecture conformed with Google’s recommendations  
• Removing links to broken pages and redirects 
• Optimising images to improve load speed 
• Optimising CSS and JavaScript code which leads to improved core website vitals 

 With Phase 1 complete we had solid foundations for growth and could start dominating in the SERPs. 

Phase 2 – Keyword Research & Content Optimisation

Our SEO experts then started to optimise content on the website and implement keyword research, and saw that product names on the website were too general. There are thousands of websites selling steel online, so we needed to stand out and implement our knowledge of how to satisfy potential customers requests before our competition could rank. We re-wrote meta data and meta descriptions to include ranking keywords we could see had the highest search volumes, and so Google could index the website and understand what potential customers were looking for. 

Next, we created bespoke content and technical copy for product and service landing pages so that Google could push those pages to organic searchers and provide clear answers to potential customers. 

We also added news and blog landing pages to the website to increase high-ranking keywords on the site, and give those conversion rich terms more real estate. We also improved image quality and image relevancy across the website, and added alt text and attributes to images to help Google improve indexing. 

Phase 3 – Backlinks & Citations

To ensure we achieved long term goals for Hibernia Steel, we then looked at analysing existing backlinks and acquiring new backlinks. This was to give more organic strength to the website, as it wasn't only our copy saying we sold Steel, but links relevant to our keywords driving traffic back to the website. We then followed this backlink work by creating new local citations and managing existing ones. 

Think of Google like a spider, it always wants to crawl websites and understand what your customers need and want - backlinks and citations are key to ensuring that spider could crawl the Hibernia Steel website and understand what customers to show the site to.

Ultimately, because SEO takes time to show growth, it was imperative we build a strong relationship with our client, stay ahead of digital trends, and always analyse the data on performance. We could see organic rankings were improving, and as we entered 2022 website traffic was at an all-time high with sessions increasing 259% Year on Year.

We’ll note that as some STEEL STRONG growth! 

// 2022 vs 2021 Results 

• Increased Average Organic Ranking For Main Keywords(YoY) by 37.41% 
• Increased New Users on Website (YoY) by 7.63% 
• Increased Users on Website (YoY) by 242% 
• Increased Sessions on Website (YoY) by 259% 
• Increased Keyword Pool by 170%