Rising Above Rivals: Bain & Gray's Local SEO Success

​Bain and Gray is a boutique recruitment agency based in London, specialising in personal assistant (PA), executive assistant (EA), and business support roles. Established in 2009, the agency offers temporary, permanent, and contract recruitment services. In 2023, Bain and Gray transitioned to an Employee-Owned Trust.

Creating a range of targeted landing pages for their key niches. This was to attract the right candidates back to the site as soon as possible. This was important as the candidate pool needs to be replenished much more frequently than the client pool, which was replenished largely via referrals & word of mouth. The pre-existing website had all of the roles concentrated into one page, therefore we needed to split these up to ensure that each unique search term was targeted at a specific page.

Link building would then become a pivotal part of ranking competitively for the candidate-targeted job pages, as these would have new, optimised URLs that hadn’t existed for nearly 2 years, which needed external authority to be passed to them.

Client-facing subfolder creation. The latter part of the strategy would then address the clients, with a revamp of web pages targeted to this segment of the audience.

Unforseen Competition

Two ex-employees from Bain and Gray left to set up their own agency in exactly the same niche. Unfortunately, they also took processes and clients, and plagiarised the structure of the website. This led to more SERP competitors, but also made it difficult for Bain and Gray to build trust with partners.

When we were brought in for organic search performance, the website had already had a redesign to create separation between the two brands. However, we needed to provide support here to bring back more of the visibility and traffic that had been lost due to the redesign and migration process in 2022 (the client's developers recommended deleting certain job type pages to "streamline" the user journey). We built trust with the client, starting small, and increasing our retainer at a time they were comfortable with us and how we worked.

Learning a Brand New CMS

The CMS of the website was one we’ve not come across before (Craft CMS), which came with its own challenges in terms of limited backend control coupled with us wanting to get things done fast and not waste any time. We also had to work with the client’s developers to implement our recommendations, which is always more difficult with an unfamiliar CMS.

We spent CPD time specifically on this platform so our team were fully informed on how it worked. This included a mixture of reading the documentation and knowledge base, as well as direct exposure to the client’s login area and liaising with the developers to establish processes and SOPs on how to do certain things with the CMS.