SEO fundamentals are pretty straightforward, right?
- Learn what your market is searching for.
- Optimize your website pages and/or create new content.
- Clean up/optimize your website – make it search-engine friendly and fast.
- Have a plan to get others to link to you and begin implementing.
- Track, rinse, repeat
Does Your Organization Solve a Real Need?
I read this SEO reminder recently, and I thought it was just brilliant: if your business solves a really painful pain point (and solves it well), you have done 70% of the work. SEO amplifies what you already are. With solid best-practice foundational elements put into place, and a commitment to continued excellence to be more visible, you can achieve results. Got that?
- solid best-practice foundational elements put into place
- a commitment to continued excellence to be more visible
By the way – this is the final article in a 3-part series on Beginner SEO Fundamentals:
- Part 1 – SEO Fundamentals Overview
- Part 2 – What Is an SEO Foundation (Hint: Where to Start with SEO)
- Part 3 – SEO Success Stories – below
Let’s pump up the energy in this room! Below are a few realistic, attainable, real-life SEO success stories of organizations newer to SEO who saw success.
3 SEO Success Stories that Will Motivate You Into Action
SEO Success Story #1: 6-Step Process That Generated 150,732 Visits
Highlights:
- Overview and Strategy: build an SEO strategy centered on evergreen content to help create long-term exposure, position the brand as an authority in the industry, capture leads, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.
- Results: Every month, organic traffic delivers hundreds of new email subscribers, affiliate commissions, and potential business leads.
- Duration: Over 18 months, applied an SEO strategy to grow traffic to over 150,700 visits.
Tips:
- This business needed to be very strategic about which topics they targeted, especially as a smaller blog with relatively low domain authority.
- Their first step was to perform keyword research and uncover evergreen topics targeted to their core persona at the time.
- Use keyword research tools to expand secondary target keywords and what questions and sub-topics to address in the content.
You can find this SEO case study here.
SEO Success Story #2: A 1-Person Business Lays the Proper Groundwork
Highlights:
- Overview: The site owner started a website in a pretty competitive niche, with zero traffic, and the owner had to handle the development, content, and SEO on his own
- Results: Using DIY strategies for search engine optimization, he managed to get the website to rank #1 for highly competitive keywords in Google.
- Duration: in under a year, the owner managed to grow his organic traffic up to over 1,000 monthly visits.
Tips:
- When you’re building a new site, you’re obviously at a disadvantage against competitors who have well-established websites with hundreds of backlinks already. However, there are also pros. By starting from scratch, the owner picked a descriptive URL, selected an SEO-friendly platform, and picked a web host with quality uptime.
- With proper website basics and starting with SEO-friendly tools and platforms, the owner moved on to the traditional SEO tactics – on- and off-page.
SEO Success Story #3: How We Ranked a Single 1500-Word Page for over 125 Keywords and 20 Backlinks in 6 Months
Highlights:
- Strategy: use subject matter experts SMEs within an organization to write authoritative, expert copy that goes deep into a single topic on a single page.
- Results: This single page ranks for 125 keywords, is the top-ranked page behind the homepage, and has naturally attained several backlinks, helping the overall website.
- Duration: the page was published in the early summer. Due to the client’s industry seasonality, peak traffic didn’t come for several months when the desired market started searching on this term. The page itself began ranking within a week and continued to gain traction.
Tips:
- This client mostly ranked for branded keywords. While several blog posts ranked here and there for low-volume keywords, this was the first time this client had invested time and resources into a Pillar page. The Pillar Page was designed to be a resource giving a comprehensive overview of a topic to educate visitors at the top of the funnel doing initial research.
- The target keywords were aligned to introducing prospects to this business’s services. As a note, when you are going after keywords higher up the funnel, the searcher intent may not yet reflect the visitor is ready to buy or even reach out. We were mindful of this page’s goals: generate brand awareness, demonstrate authority, and naturally attract backlinks.
- Through keyword research, we identified many great keyword phrases, questions, and sub-topics that were important to include in the content for a fantastic user experience. Another note: I find that most clients, who are experts at what they do, fail to “dumb it down” (for lack of a better term) and forget to add 101-level context to their copy. For Pillar Pages, 101-level copy is not only good for Google, it also helps to orient visitors to the page and refresh them on complex subjects that come naturally to the SMEs.
Do you have any SEO wins or a success story? You don’t need large-scale results to be proud of your effort. Start by celebrating the small SEO wins. Hit reply and let me know.
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Jenny Munn
Jenny is an independent SEO Consultant with more than 14 years of experience helping companies, brands, and marketing teams generate brand awareness, traffic, and conversions with SEO. She is a frequent speaker and trainer, and has taught SEO to thousands of marketers, web designers, and content creators over the years.
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