SEO Case Study: Top Google Rankings In Less Than 3 Months

Even with the rapid rise of AI, ranking your website at the top of the Google search results remains one of the most effective marketing channels.

Recently, we wanted to improve our own rankings for the competitive keyword “web design melbourne.”

Through a targeted SEO campaign, we moved from an average ranking of 22 to consistently appearing in the top 3 in less than three months.

In the content below, I’ll share a breakdown of exactly how we did this so you can apply the strategies to your own business.

Let’s dive in!

Key takeaways:

• Prioritise one landing page at a time
• Optimise your landing page content first
• Use keyword clusters to target related searches
• Build topic authority with regular, relevant content linking to your landing page

1. Review the SEO opportunity

To start, we need clarity around the SEO opportunity to ensure it matches our business goals.

As we specialise in website design and our office is in Melbourne, it makes business sense for us to rank in the top results for this service.

We reviewed our current keyword rankings for “web design melbourne” and we were sitting in the top 30 – we knew we could do better!

So we set a goal of “top 5 rankings for web design melbourne” as the target and gave ourselves a 3-month timeline to get results.

2. Cluster the keywords

A cluster is a group of related SEO keywords.

Rather than just choosing one keyword, ranking for a keyword cluster is a more relevant way to do SEO as it has a better chance of increasing visibility, clicks and conversions.

Once we knew what service we wanted to target, we did SEO keyword research to identify a few other related keywords, such as “web design agency melbourne” and we added these to the cluster.

3. Optimise the landing page

We reviewed our main web design landing page to see how the existing content matched the keywords we wanted to target.

Our SEO copywriting team developed updated content and clear messaging, relevant images and SEO-friendly formatting to maximise relevance.

4. Update internal linking

Internal linking is an often overlooked SEO strategy.

It’s simply pointing relevant links on your website to your more important pages.

We strategically updated internal links throughout the SGD website to direct authority to the main landing page, increasing its ranking power.

5. Improve site speed

Our website was already fast and loading in less than 2 seconds.

But during this optimisation process, we identified that it could load faster on mobile devices.

Optimising website speed ensured a smoother user experience, reduced bounce rates, and aligned with Google’s Core Web Vitals.

We reviewed scripts that did not need to be loaded on our landing page, we updated the web hosting cache, and optimised images without losing quality.

6. Update the main menu

A website main menu is useful for visitors, but it’s also important for Google.

We moved the “Website Design” landing page higher in the main menu to signal its importance to search engines and improve accessibility for visitors.

7. Increase Google Reviews

Reviews are essential for trust.

They’re also another signal to Google and potential clients that indicates we’re a real, trustworthy business and that we do good work.

We acquired 5 new 5-star Google reviews, which helped to build trust, improve our local rankings, and add social proof to our business.

8. Create quality content consistently

Search engines love new and updated content.

It indicates that a business is providing value to its customers.

We have been publishing our “Marketing Monday” newsletter every week for 25 weeks now and we also publish these articles on our blog.

Many of the articles also include links to our web design landing page.

Not only does this increase internal links, but it helps to build our “topical authority” on web design.

Our content indicates to Google that we are an authority on this topic, and overtime this helps to position us in the top Google results.

Weekly blog posts, optimised with links to the money page, strengthened our topical authority and improved rankings for our target keywords.

Summary of SEO Results

By January, just two months after starting our campaign, we moved from the top 30 positions into the top 10 for “web design melbourne.”

As a B2B marketing company, the holiday period meant minimal changes in click-through rates or traffic.

However, by the third week of January, when businesses returned to full activity, we were thrilled to see a jump from the top 10 into the top 3 rankings!

Our positions continue to improve, and our focus now is on widening the competitive gap to maintain top 3 rankings across the web design keyword cluster.

This campaign demonstrates our expertise as a web design and SEO agency that delivers meaningful results.

The strategies we used—focused keyword targeting, content optimisation, and topic authority building—are the same methods we apply to help our clients grow.

If you’d like our help to grow your business with SEO, get started with our SEO Quick Start service.