There’s a story I always churn out whenever a client asks me about the importance of having a sound linking strategy for their website. It’s based on personal experience but the names have been changed to protect the client. I don’t think they’d mind me mentioning them like this, but hey, it doesn’t matter.
All you need to know is it’s true….
So, this client gets in touch with me and they are called (this is the only made-up bit) River Clyde Helicopter Tours (RCHT). They are the first and only business in Scotland providing helicopter tours on the River Clyde and they’ve got a problem. Even though they are the only suppliers and they have a website at www.riverclydehelicoptertours.com, they aren’t number one in Google when someone types in ‘river clyde helicopter’. They’re number three! Obviously that isn’t good enough.
To make matters worse, numbers one and two on Google were holiday experience companies selling tickets for flights on RCHT at a 20% markup! We had a look and straight away, the reason was obvious. The holiday experience companies had hundreds of other holiday and leisure industry providers, hotels and associations all linking to them – RCHT had a small proportion of sites linking to them by comparison. Google had looked at the relevance of these sites primarily on the quantity of the links, felt the providers were more relevant and then that was why RCHT were struggling.
How it changed
I’d love to take credit for reversing this one but I can’t. It happened pretty soon after the phone call though. RCHT announced that they would be taking off from a city centre location and as this got them quite a bit of press (people were objecting to the noise pollution) there was a feature on the BBC News website and they included a link to the RCHT website. From that point, RCHT moved to number one on Google and have stayed there ever since.
Why it changed
The BBC website is one of the most popular websites in the country and viewed as highly authoratitive. There are almost 24,000,000 links to the BBC site and as so many sources feel the BBC site is worth linking to, Google reflects this by giving websites that the BBC decide to link to a better page ranking.
A link to your website from the BBC is like gold dust. Just don’t break the law trying to get one!