We were contacted in March 2015 by a photographer based in Sydney who has having huge problems with spam, and was also having trouble getting featured for her target keywords on Google. She was sitting in the middle of page two for her target keywords, and that was to a single gallery on her website.
The spam problem was relatively easy: we moved her to Gmail for business. Gmail has some of the best spam filtering around at the moment, almost all spam is caught, and very few legitimate emails are sent into the spam folder. This was a quick and easy win, and made life much easier for the photographer.
Next we looked at search engine optimization. The main problems were lack of applicable information for Google to work out what they did and where they did it. Simply adding metadata to the pages, done through her WordPress system, fixed the problem reasonably quickly. To further increase the ranking we did some performance work, adding a content distribution network, optimizing images, and adding caching.
By the time we’d finished the website loaded in 3 seconds instead of 15, and they were the second hit in Google for their target search terms – a huge success!