This is one of our very rare web design make-overs; we don't normally do "SEO work" on existing sites, since it tends to be more of a hassle than just building a site correctly from scratch. You have to go through someone else's code and remove stuff, add stuff, and edit almost everything, which ends up being twice as much work. In this case I knew the owners and did them a big favor.
The result? We turned a site that literally couldn't be found into a top-ranking winner.
The existing site had been up for a few years, yet we spent a hilarious half an hour trying to FORCE it to appear in search results and failed! We tried the name of the company, the town, the owner's names, and all those things combined and in long-string quotes, and still the site wouldn't come up on Bing, Yahoo, or Google.
It seemed the site either wasn't indexed or had possibly been banned (although that would be unlikely across all three of the big search engines). But we did find it indexed in all of them. It was just such poor web design that search engines didn't see anything of value and didn't know how to categorize it.
The first change was a new header on every page, with the company name, address, and phone number in plain text. Next was editing the copy to immediately tell visitors and search engines "We are a cattle farm that sells natural beef", which could have been implied from the original site but wasn't obvious. Then a pile of photos were added, since there were few. After that, tweaking all page elements for clarity.
The intention was to get it ranking well for "natural beef" in the Peterborough and Keene regions of Ontario. But now it actually ranks in the top 5 for "natural beef Ontario", which is substantial. It's certainly a long way from spending half an hour unable to find a site you know exists.
