Cleaning up before building up.
The instinct with a weak profile is to bury it under new links. We did the opposite. The profile shrank before it grew. Removing what was dragging the domain down made every link earned afterwards count for more.
Accountancy ·London
First page for "London accountants."
A small London practice, competing for the term owned by the largest accounting firms in the UK. A few agencies had gone after it before us and come up short. Here is what it took.
First page
"London accountants"
The term they had never cracked, against the biggest firms in the UK.
100s
First page rankings
Industry specific service pages, not just the headline term.
Rebuilt
Backlink profile
Years of low quality links cleared out before we built anything.
Client
Braant Accountants
Industry
Accountancy (small practice)
Location
London
Services
SEO · Content · Links · Local
A term they had been chasing for years.
Braant are a small accounting practice in London. Good work, loyal clients, and a search presence that never matched either. The term that mattered to them was the obvious one, "london accountants", and it was the one term they had never been able to reach the first page for.
That is understandable. It is a brutally competitive phrase. Going after it meant competing with some of the largest accounting firms in the UK, businesses with budgets and domain authority a small practice cannot simply buy past.
They had worked with a few different agencies before us. Some link building had been done, but the sites those links came from were of questionable quality. Before we could build anything, we had to undo what had already been built.
The same practice, a different search result.
No chart. The comparison is the chart.
Before
- Off page 1 for "london accountants" after years of trying
- A backlink profile carrying links from questionable sites
- Visibility resting on a single headline term
- Service pages that did not speak to any particular industry
- No meaningful presence on industry specific websites
After
- First page for "london accountants"
- A cleaned up profile, built on links worth having
- First page rankings across 100s of supporting terms
- Industry specific service pages, each earning their own
- Featured on the most prominent sites in their industry
A note on how we count. First page means the first page of results for the term, not a permanent seat on it. A national commercial term like this one moves week to week, so rankings were tracked over time rather than screenshotted on a good day. The traffic picture came from Braant's own analytics, not from a third party estimate.
Four phases, named by what they did.
Not by when they happened. Braant needed the first phase more than most clients do, because the ground had to be cleared before anything could be built on it.
Phase 01
Undoing the old links.
Nothing new would hold while the old profile was still attached to the domain. We went through the referring domains, separated the links worth keeping from the ones actively working against them, and cleaned the rest away. Quiet, unglamorous work, and the reason everything after it moved.
Phase 02
Earning links worth having.
Volume replaced with quality. Placements on the sites that accountants and their clients actually read, built around things Braant could genuinely say. The profile stopped being a liability and started being an asset.
Phase 03
Service pages with an industry behind them.
A generic accountancy page competes with every accountant in the country. We rebuilt the service pages around the specific industries Braant serve, so each page had a narrower fight to pick, and won it.
Phase 04
Closing on the headline term.
With the authority rebuilt and the supporting pages ranking, the site finally had the weight to compete for "london accountants". First page, in a result owned by firms many times their size.
The decisions that disproportionately mattered.
Not the whole programme. The handful of calls that changed the trajectory.
One page per industry, not one page for all.
Braant serve very different kinds of business, and each of them searches differently. Splitting the service pages by industry gave every page a specific term to own, and turned one unwinnable fight into 100s of smaller ones we could win.
Visibility beyond the headline term.
London is not one market, and one phrase is not a strategy. Alongside the national fight we worked the local layer, so the practice turned up for the searches happening around it rather than resting everything on a single result.
Getting featured where accountants are read.
Rankings follow reputation. We worked to get Braant featured on the most prominent industry specific sites, the ones Google already treats as authorities on the subject. Borrowed trust, earned honestly.
What it added up to.
The headline term was the one everybody in the business could name, and it was the one that had never moved. Getting Braant onto the first page for "london accountants" put a small practice in front of firms many times its size, in the result their own clients were searching.
The wider win was that none of it rested on a single phrase. The industry specific pages carried first page rankings of their own, the profile that had been holding the domain back was cleared and rebuilt, and the practice was visible across the searches that actually brought work in, not just the one everybody watches.
Your version of this
A term you have never been able to crack?
Send us your URL. We will run your site through the same first pass we ran on Braant, and send back a 15 minute video walkthrough of what we would do. Or whether we are the right people to do it.