Chester.com
Case Study

About Chester.com

Chester.com is a local website detailing what’s on, things to do and see, and places to drink, eat and stay in the city of Chester. The site was built by another company, and previous SEO had been undertaken on the site by a third party before Engage Web became involved.

Key Measurables:

Over 26M Impressions in Google Search

Chester.com appeared in search results 26M times from the start of the SEO campaign in August 2022 – November 2023

520K new users to site since the start of the SEO campaign

from August 2022 to November 2023

30.43% Increase in Organic Search Traffic

from October 2022 to October 2023

The Challenge

Diane at Chester.com came to Engage Web from a recommendation by one of our clients. Chester.com had already been undertaking SEO with another company, but the website wasn’t very well optimised and, with it having such a powerful domain name, Engage Web projected the website could perform so much better. We identified several actions that could be taken to improve the site’s SEO standing, and created an SEO strategy to be implemented. One of the many technical issues the website was experiencing was that it was extremely slow, particularly the admin side, or back end. Much work was undertaken to remove the bloat, and dramatically increase the website’s speed. Diane also needed regular help with making updates to the site, which required a quick turnaround as many of the updates were time sensitive.

The Solution

Engage Web began undertaking an SEO strategy for Chester.com. This involved resetting up all of the goals in Google Analytics to ensure conversions were being tracked accurately and were providing a true picture – essential for the nature of Chester.com’s business. Previously goals and events were not being properly tracked, which made it difficult to demonstrate return on investment for Chester.com’s advertisers. In addition to undertaking technical SEO actions to improve the speed of the site, Engage Web also installed a CDN (content delivery network) on the site to improve the site’s speed further. Engage Web then moved the hosting of the website to our web server. In addition to this, we delivered a content strategy and a web support retainer for Chester.com, ensuring any updates to the site are actioned in a timely manner.

“Working with Engage Web has put me in a position to carry on with getting the business to the level I want it to be at.

The growth in the audience to the site is what I'm happiest about, the fact we've grown our audience with the content. At Christmas, we usually have a spike of up to 3,000, sometimes 4,000 views a day, and then it drops. However, there hasn't been a day that we've dropped below 2,000 page views for a long, long time now!

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Engage Web. There's always someone there that can answer your questions and help, even if you’re not technical at all, which I'm not technical at all! You've got that safety net and a holding hand to guide you through and to help you.”

Success factors

With over half a million new users brought to the site during the SEO campaign so far, and the site having appeared in Google searches 26 MILLION times throughout the campaign, Chester.com is now bringing in more visitors than ever, ensuring its advertisers are being seen by more visitors to Chester. What’s more, thanks to the increase in page speed, the site is much more usable for both site visitors and for Chester.com itself.

Moving forward

The Chester.com site continues to grow from strength to strength, and in addition to continuing the SEO strategy, Diane is now investing in email marketing with Engage Web to further grow the business.