8x organic traffic in 12 months.

The first job Sway Digital did was to make sure the Manor House website was actually tracking. We checked their Google Analytics and submitted the site to Search Console. They had Google Analytics installed, but it wasn't tracking events — so they had no idea who was booking through the website.

Google Search Console wasn't set up either, so we needed to submit the website to Google from scratch. Once the basics were fixed, we ran a full SEO competitive analysis, technical audit, and keyword research.

The SEO audit highlighted several technical and on-page issues — the two biggest being page speed and a broken redirect.

A key role of the website is to show off the beautiful interior and exterior of the Manor House, so the site relied heavily on high-quality imagery. The problem was that the images were huge, and that was dragging the site's speed down. We needed to optimise the imagery so it loaded faster, without losing the quality that sells the venue. The site was built on WordPress, so we used the Imagify plugin to convert images from JPEG to WebP — cutting file size significantly while keeping the visual quality intact.

The second major issue was redirection. manorhouselindley.co.uk was using a temporary 302 redirect. The problem with 302s is that they're designed to be temporary — they don't pass on any link equity, which can hold back rankings. By accessing the site's .htaccess file, we confirmed the redirect was set to a 302 and switched it to a permanent 301 instead.

The results were almost immediate — referring domains increased as link equity started passing through to the Manor House website properly for the first time.

The audit revealed several opportunities to improve on-page SEO — meta titles, descriptions, and H1 tags could all be sharpened, along with the site's internal linking. We rewrote and restructured these across the site, and it had an immediate effect on organic keywords and traffic.