SEO Case Study: 292% Increase In Leads Generated in 6 Months

I’m going to be brutally honest. There are way too many people in internet marketing today that think “great content” is enough to build a high performing online business. These “gurus” will tell you that content builds links and that’s all you need to achieve #1 rankings. It’s complete garbage.

It typically goes like this – you invest your money to one of these “gurus”, get promised the world and then you’re left with nothing in return apart from some badly written articles or some shitty backlinks in the background, sounds familiar right?

If you’re serious about building a high performing online income it’s going to need a little bit more thought and structure. Too often we find ourself in a state of “shotgun marketing” where it’s literally like throwing cooked spaghetti against a wall and hoping something sticks.

Today we’re going to show you our proven results and exactly how we increased conversions for a single client by 292% in just 6 months. For this particular client it meant a difference of 75 enquiries / leads in the month of December (111 in total for the month) when compared to July (36 for the month).

Configure Conversion Tracking

Before we get started with any campaign we make sure we were tracking the metrics that matter.

Tracking metrics that relate to business goals, i.e. sales and enquiries, means that we make changes based on what we know is working. We’re essentially removing the guess-work which allows us to make educated improvements.

We also gather a baseline of current rankings and use this as another performance indicator for the campaign. I’m completely honest when I tell you that rankings are simply vanity metrics you can use to boost your ego. If you’re building a high performing online business then you want to be everywhere and at the core of that providing knockout value to your customers.

Watching your ranking reports can be as disheartening as watching grass grow. Stop wasting your time if you’re doing that.

Unless you’re in the industry of knitting cat mittens, i.e. you have no competition,  search rankings will likely take some time before you see results.

Build a Solid Foundation – 130% increase in organic conversions in a single month

When it comes to SEO the first thing any “guru” should do is check that your website is built on solid foundations. This is especially apparent when talking about local businesses because just a few tweaks to your site can skyrocket your website up local search terms.

Unfortunately, there’s often nothing sexy about it.

Key actions

• Improved content relevance using the “keyword mashing” technique.
  • Modifying a single page to be relevant to a group of similar search terms – See more on keyword mashing
• Improved URL and website structure and visitor useability with internal linking.
• Improved site speed and performance reducing the load time from 4.7s to 2.7s and halved the total page size.
  • Ideally we’d like this to be even lower however the site uses a plugin for mobile responsiveness which we can’t avoid at this point.
• Reverse engineered competitors to understand where improvements could be made.

Todays SEO is as much about relevance as it is about rankings. A single page with relevant on site content such as written copy, meta tags and URL structure can ensure that your website is relevant for a group of search terms rather than just one.  This technique is called keyword mashing where in its simplest form you simply research and find a group of similar keywords and ensure that a page on your site is relevant for each of them.

For example debt collectors, debt collection, debt collection agency and many others are all highly relevant terms. Although they keywords are different it’s quite possible that the intent may be the same.

Ranking Improvements from July to August

Minimising Wasted AdWords Spend – %87 Increase in AdWords conversions in a single month.

It’s often the case that a business will be running Google AdWords but then completely ignores it post launch. Even worse is when a business isn’t tracking conversions so they have no idea which keywords result in dollars to their business.

1. Not knowing your data = wasted spend.
2. Not reviewing your AdWords continuously = wasted spend.

Key actions

• We removed any keywords that hadn’t converted since the start of the year.
• We removed any keywords where the cost per conversion was significantly higher than the average.
• We segmented search terms into relevant groups to improve the Google AdWords Quality Score.
• We readjusted the conversion tracking to track Google Analytic conversions as well as AdWords conversions.

Reverse Engineering, Link Building & Good Ol’ Fashioned Outreach

Unfortunately you’ve been told a lie, content doesn’t build links especially when it’s mediocre. It’s called the publish and pray approach and it occurs when you create content, hit that big blue publish button and then sit back and wait for the links and social shares to roll in.

If you’ve tried this then I’m sure by now you know that it rarely works.

It’s just as much about the content as it is about the promotion and amplification of that content.

1. Find link-worthy content (reverse engineer competitors)
2. Make something even better (content marketing)
3. Reach out to the right people (outreach and amplification)

So that’s exactly what we did. We found out the content that was working for our client and then began creating it. When we had the content we reached out to high value websites to see whether they’d be interested in linking back to our site or our content. Here’s an example of the email.

And here’s the response

Outreach and Amplification Success

Key actions

• We reverse engineered competitors to find successful content in this industry.
• We generated new content that was bigger and better than what we found.
• We reached out to websites that could help promote our new content.
• We created new content for guest blogging on big websites in their industry.

6 Month Results – Almost 300% increase in conversions (enquiries, sales & subscribers)

The key to this story is that quality online marketing, doesn’t matter if it’s SEO or Social Media, in most cases is about generating ROI by attracting quality customers at the lowest cost per acquisition possible (not necessarily cheap). This means we need to focus on the metrics that matter otherwise we might be missing data that helps us make good business decisions.

We should be aware by now that rankings are a very poor measure for success and the same can be said for social shares, visitors and more. They can course be indication of success but when you base the success of a campaign on metrics that don’t directly relate to your business goals then you’re likely to be disappointed.

As Rand Fishkin shows it’s often not the 1^st click that gets a sale but the trust that’s built from valuable content, continuous promotion & content amplification that creates brand awareness and trust.

Updates – 8 Months, #1 Ranking & Best Performing Month on Record

This campaign has continued to go from strength to strength with last month proving to be the best performing month on record. This was shortly followed by a number #1 ranking for two of their primary keywords and with more to follow shortly.