For context, our current website - www.cobright.au - is filled to the brim with keywords. Each page heading features keywords for Google to use to index the site and understand how relevant we are to any given search. Yet, no matter how hard we hit the keyword game, we always seemed to come up short against our web design compatriots when it came to SEO.
Tired of always being the bridesmaid, never the bride, we took matters into our own hands and set up an entirely new website.
Knowing that ‘web design Toowoomba’ is the most popular Google search, we purchased the domain name ‘webdesigntowoomba.au’.
The new site only talks about one thing: web design Toowoomba.
The theory is if someone searches ‘web design Toowoomba’, Google should recognise that our Web Design Toowoomba site is appropriate for that search and list us highly in the results.
So, how has it gone?
Since it launched in April 2023, our Web Design Toowoomba site ranks anywhere between the 5th and 7th spot on Google.
This means it currently ranks higher than our actual CoBright site.
The other SEO factors
SEO is a fickle beast and there are numerous factors that impact it. Let’s rule some out to ensure it’s just the domain being tested:
- Page keywords
Setting up a new site meant that we had to rewrite all new content, otherwise, we’d risk being SEO-penalised for duplicate content.
While the page keywords may have a role in the results, the fact that these keywords are also present on our CoBright site suggests that the results are purely thanks to the different domain.
- Content updates
To boost SEO on our CoBright website, we continuously load past projects and blogs to give Google something fresh to index and show that it’s an ‘active’ site. This doesn’t occur on the Web Design Toowoomba site.
- Traffic
We don’t actively drive traffic to the Web Design Toowoomba website. There is no social media, digital marketing, advertising, or any form of marketing driving traffic to the Web Design Toowoomba site. It doesn’t even have a Google Business listing.
Essentially, the site has no reason to rank well on Google, other than its domain name.