Himac Attachments was growing solidly but struggling to rank on Google. Here’s how they turned things around and gave their business the edge.

Strategy: Hire an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) professional to overhaul the website with a focus on ranking for popular industry search terms. 

Result: Bagged Google’s #1 ranking for its key search term within a year, with contacts generated through the company website tripling. 

Himac Attachments marketing manager Simon Blackburn is almost evangelical about the difference some savvy SEO can make to a business. It’s little wonder. In less than a year, the Albany-based business managed to knock its larger east coast rival off Google’s top spot and significantly boost business in the process. 

Blackburn first approached his boss about spending money on SEO after becoming frustrated at the company’s lack of online visibility. 

“We were doing well and we’d been consistently growing, but we were noticing that we were having to rely on (Google) AdWords to get ourselves noticed,” he says. 

“We were pretty much non-existent from an organic perspective. For all the main search terms, we were either on the second page, or you’d have to go 10 pages back to find us.” 

This was particularly problematic for Himac which designs and manufactures attachments for earthmoving and agricultural machinery.  

While the business is based in Albany, it sells Australia-wide and needs national exposure to compete with larger rivals on the east coast. 

Blackburn recruited SEO professional Andrew Doyle, of Doyle Digital, to work on their site, rewriting and expanding copy with a focus on the industry’s most popular search term, “skid steer attachments”. 

He wanted the site to rank organically because, while AdWords was useful, he felt many users placed more faith in Google’s unpaid page rankings.  

It was an incremental process, but within 12 months Himac Attachments had hit the number one spot. 

“Even just switching from position two to position one we noticed an obvious, overnight difference in the amount of enquiries,” Blackburn says. 

“We came back from that weekend that we hit number one and we had around 50 (enquiries) instead of 25.” 

Now their site regularly outranks a much larger rival, which Blackburn says is “amazing” and motivating. “I think we’ve brought ourselves to their attention.” 

Throughout the campaign, Himac focused on the most popular industry-specific search terms, along with making their content informative and entertaining. 

“We’ve managed to maintain a ridiculously low bounce rate which really shows people are coming to our site, finding what they want and staying on there for a decent amount of time,” he said. 

Some key advice Blackburn offers others looking to kick-start growth with SEO

• Understand it’s a gradual process: “When we started we were making big increases, but the closer you get to the front, the harder it is to get up there.” 
• Beware of big promises: “Google is constantly changing its ranking algorithm and you can’t force Google to do something. So be wary of people who say they can guarantee you the number one ranking.” 
• Try to define what SEO is worth to you: “Why have a website if people can’t find you?” Make sure you study your analytics before beginning SEO so you can track your results, Blackburn says. “A lot of businesses won’t see the return on investment unless they implement tracking from the start.”