Rob: I think we knew that taking on an SEO company wasn’t going to be a first page to Google thing, it was going to be a long-term process. There are some very fierce competitors above us, it’s like Etsy, not on the high street. Edge45 has helped us to try and bridge that gap. Since joining them in November 2018, we’ve grown the organic side 300% year-on-year.
Jonathon: I feel that the biggest challenge was the sheer volume of really well-established competitors that had been in the market for a large number of years. For us, it was a case of looking at the things that these competitors were doing well and looking at how we could close the gap and catch them up.
Rob: It was quite a daunting task to make ourselves stand out. Edge45 showed us it was possible, there was a lot of hard work ahead, but it was certainly possible.
Jonathon: It was a case of looking at the things that the competition were doing well and learning from that and considering how we could put an Always Personal stamp on these tactics the competitors were using.
Rob: Edge45 laid the foundations. We came up with a long-term and a short-term strategy. Fairly quickly there were some nice quick wins that we could have which we jumped onto straight away. I’d say the fruits probably arrived within the first six months. The COVID pandemic was probably a scary time for everybody. Our initial thoughts was pull everything back. I think it was a weary time and we didn’t know which way it was going. I think for the first week sales plummeted and I think they did for everybody. Everybody stopped spending. But then what we noticed after the first week is sales started to rocket. So all the hard work that they did started to pay off because the demand was up.
Jonathon: It was, obviously, a very difficult time for everyone when the first lockdown hit, but it was a real silver lining for us to see how well Always Personal were performing. We’d, obviously, worked hard in the months and years before that to build up the site’s visibility and this got them into a position where they could really capitalize on the massive increase in appetite for the products.
Rob: So with the increase in demand, we managed to pull back on our other marketing activities. So we managed to save quite a lot of money by just letting the customers find us organically from the work that Edge45 had done.
Jonathon: We saw a big opportunity to expand on our services and work in this digital PR component to the overarching SEO strategy. And what we looked at is the trending items on the site and we looked at how we could harness these really interesting products to build that site authority and get more awareness. Our approach to digital PR is content-led. So it starts with a creative concept. We put together high-quality content and then we then marry that content up with the right people and then we deliver that content at the time when it’s going to resonate most.
Rob: Yeah, so it’s been a really good journey with Edge45. And I think from the beginning it just really felt like a very caring company.
Jonathon: So I think we’ve got a really, really strong relationship with Rob and the wider team at Always Personal, which has really grown over time. They’ve got a lot of trust in what we’re doing.
Rob: As a business, we’re permanently innovating. We’d like to go towards the wedding market next year. Post-pandemic a lot of weddings were unfortunately delayed and we think that next year will be the year of the weddings. So, Edge45 can help us to promote that.
