Background
This client was a well-respected player in the carpet and tile industry. They had just introduced a new product to the North America market and hired a digital marketing agency to help them launch and quickly grow demand for it. The client wanted fast results, competency, and communication, and they brought me on as the SEO arm of their digital agency team.
The Challenge
My 6-month SEO Initiative was designed to:
- Grow consumer sales for their new product
- Attract distributors
- Improve the site for users and Google/search engines
- Grow the list email of subscribers
In addition to my work, the agency I was working through had a comprehensive strategy that consisted of updating the website copy, blogging, social media, refreshing the new product section of the site, email marketing, and more. I worked closely with the technical team, copywriter, and designer to make sure all elements, channels and activities complemented and were optimized for SEO.
SEO Strategy
The SEO strategy I created was designed to answer the questions:
- What do we need to do to make sure the site is as technically optimal as possible for SEO and Google?
- How can we bring more attention and awareness to this new product when people are out there doing Google searches on competitive products and solutions?
- What existing content can we leverage? What new content should be created?
My initial SEO audits revealed a lot of important competitive and target market insight. Solid audits are especially important when a product, or solution, is unknown, innovative and new. I designed a strategy to ensure we were bridging the gap between wants, needs, desires, and known product alternatives of prospective customers.
SEO activities I project managed and implemented included:
- Improving existing pages
- Creating new pages from scratch
- Changing navigation naming conventions, structure and page name to be more intuitive to the target market
- Creating a keyword-driven editorial blog calendar
- Beginning a blog series intended to attract community and industry back links and social media signals
- Working with the creative team to create an attractive opt-in piece and landing page for email subscribers
Throughout the 6 months, we did 3 critical activities:
- Knocked out 10 SEO pages in one month. It makes a world of difference when you have someone dedicated to writing who understands how to write persuasively to pain points. Normally, optimizing 10 pages takes on average 2 months, but the team worked to get these pages published quickly.
- Tracked key analytics data closely. The client came to us wondering why no one was calling yet, but upon investigation, the analytics showed that the traffic was ending up on the “Find a Store” page. Clearly the data was telling us that the prospects didn’t need or want to call and talk to someone – they wanted to find out where they could purchase the product. We changed our calls to action to reflect this intent and made sure this page was prominent, easy to find, and contained clear, compelling copy.
- Created several keyword-driven blog posts that supported our core product pages. Not only did these blog posts provide more context and educational information for the market, but the additional long-tail keywords and internal links helped these pages be more findable and boosted in the rankings.
SEO Results
As with any SEO campaign, looking at one month of analytics in isolation isn’t extremely helpful. However, there is gold in monitoring analytics across several months before, during, and after the strategy has been implemented.
We found exceptional results at the end of the 6-month campaign:
- Growth of non-brand keywords on Page 1 increased:
- Month 1: 53
- Month 6: 635
- Non-Brand keywords that got clicks back to the website increased 336%
- Month 1: 19 non-branded words got clicked on
- Month 6: 83 non-branded words got clicked on to bring visitors to the site
- Page visits to two critical pages increased tremendously: “Find a Store” page and “Contact Us” page:
- Find a Store: Increased 872%
- Month 1 – 22 visits
- Month 6 – 214 visits
- Contact Us: Increased 80%
- Month 1 – 103 visits
- Month 6 – 186 visits
- Find a Store: Increased 872%
Testimonial
“When working with clients that need serious SEO results, bringing in Jenny to work with our team has proven to be invaluable. Her approach brings a feeling of confidence to the entire project, and the final results always confirm that feeling. Our main goal is to help clients reach theirs, and Jenny’s expertise is a big part of making that happen.” – Mickey Mellen, GreenMellen Media