Here’s an example of one of our clients, ApproveMe.com, who continues to experience a positive growth trajectory for their entire business as a direct result of our technical SEO, content strategy & creation, and paid advertising management campaigns.
Here’s a breakdown of what we’ll walk through:
- Performance by KPI
- Performance by Visualization
- How We Did It: SEO – Technical
- How We Did It: SEO – Content Strategy, Creation, & Optimization
- How We Did It: SEO – Marketing
- How We Did It: Paid Ad Management
- Challenges We Overcame
- Work With Us
The revenue growth is being driven in part from SEO, in part from paid advertising optimization, and in part from growth opportunities resulting from content built on the website.
We focus on revenue growth for our client as there’s truly no more important metric for the company. Rankings are cool. Traffic is great. Revenue is what counts. Below is a breakdown of what we’ve built together so far and the results we’ve achieved.
Client Performance KPIs
- Revenue: +113% YoY
- 2020 H1 Revenue: +32% YoY
- Q2 Revenue: +79% YoY
- SEO Traffic: +362% YoY
- SEO Signups: +131% YoY
- Non-Brand SEO Traffic: +467% YoY
- Non-Brand SEO Signups: +329% YoY
- Paid Advertising Customer Acquisition: +154%
- Paid Advertising CPA: -42%
SEO Performance Charts
SEO visibility has blown up. It’s directly related to the new content we’ve been creating together and the effects it’s had across the business, leading to backlink acquisition, new partnership opportunities, new marketing opportunities, and more.
Keyword rankings grew
No surprise here given traffic growing. But, suffice to say, the number of keywords they were ranking on blew up. They’re ranking on 322% more keywords overall today (from 5k to 20k).
And I know what you may be thinking… ranking on more keywords is great, but were they in good positions? Did they drive value? Yes. And yes.
Backlinking domains grew
They also began acquiring a lot more backlinks as a result of the content we created. They generated 35% more backlinking domains in that time, almost exclusively to the new content hubs that we built together.
Here’s How We Did It
After getting acquainted with the team, we set to work understanding the industry, both their direct market and the area they are driving their product up-market into. We looked at the competition, we looked at the activities they were doing, the content they were creating, and what what was working and not working for the competition. As well as adjacent competition who didn’t compete directly, but had complementary offerings.
Armed with that information we crafted a strategy to put them on a path to compete and win.
Part 1 – Technical SEO & Site Cleanup
For this client, technical SEO played an early role in cleaning up and properly structuring their website. They had a lot of tech debt, and still have some to this day.
They also had a fair number of on-site errors to clean up. Our approach is usually to “clean the house up” before we invite new guests over. It generally leads to better user experience – which then feeds into positive SEO performance.
We resolved:
- internal linking issues
- slow page issues
- pages missing images + meta data
- internal and external broken links
- pages missing analytics tagging
Part 2 – Content Strategy
We developed a strategy that would help with product on-ramps, as well as direct customer acquisition focused content. The content we planned to create touched on multiple levels of a customer journey and different phases of where the audience spent their time. We also took into account the future of where the product was going down the road and integrated technical plans as well as content plans.
We’ve still got a number of other areas we hope to continue content growth within, and we’ve not even been able to really tackle their up-market category yet either – so the continued growth potential is exciting.
We wanted to:
- reach prospective customers
- reach potential customers
- reach those researching competitors
- reach upper funnel prospects who are interested in the supplemental offerings
Part 3 – Content Creation
This has arguably been the biggest piece of our partnership and has involved over 100+ pieces of content being generated over the past 12 months with much of it coming in the last 6-9 months just around the end of 2019. The noticeable up-tick in traffic and rankings accompanies this execution.
We focused on prospect needs and wants, as well as educational and informative content. We also worked on some competitive content while exploring the space.
Plenty of people will talk about “intent” but really matching intent and going above and beyond is what we’ve found succeeds best. Great content alone will not always win the race but in plenty of areas we’ve seen success with it – particularly when pairing with technical site optimizations.
We worked on:
- product marketing pages
- a brand new content hub
- thought leadership
- competitive comparison content
- re-imagining an existing content hub
- helpful tools created to lure free users
Part 4 – Content Optimization
With some existing content already in place, we’ve gone through an evaluation process of what was performing, why, how it satisfied user intent, and worked to optimize some of the existing content.
We re-imagined:
- content previously built in years past
- content created by competitors
Part 5 – Marketing Campaigns
This was more of a bonus which sometimes comes up during campaigns, but varies by industry.
We’ve advised our client on a couple of investment opportunities that have come up through our projects together. Not a normal part of the contract we’ve got in place, as they aren’t planned, but we believe our feedback helped them make important business decisions informed with more data. These campaigns have generated over 4,000 new well qualified prospects which will ultimately feed into their new product’s sales engine.
These weren’t irrelevant keywords as can sometimes be the case in SEO case studies. These drive qualified traffic. They drive signups. They drive prospects. They drive visits from people who then link to the content.
We’ve also explored several partnership opportunities during this process which have come up from either content opportunities or backlink acquisition opportunities. Some of these have generated results in the near term and others are now sitting in a “parking lot” waiting for the new product to launch to capitalize on.
We worked on:
- promotion opportunity for our new content hub with a third party
- co-promoted content opportunities
Part 6 – Paid Advertising Management
We’ve also worked on their paid advertising programs as well. We began optimizing campaign strategy and execution in February of 2020. This entailed paid search and display, third party display campaigns, and social media advertising.
In four months of work this is what we’ve achieved so far:
- Purchases grew by 154%
- CPA was reduced by 42%
Challenges We Overcame Together
We hit a few snags along the way, as happens in business.
Developer resources were scarce early on which slowed technical cleanup and the ability to launch new content. It delayed several content projects but has been alleviated and helped improve other aspects of web optimization. Our client solved this and it’s a since forgotten bump in the road.
Finding strong technical writers who could also handle the fun brand voice was a challenge early on. We ended up using a content platform where we could talk with writers, get a sense of fit and trial them out and continue working together to refine voice and comprehensiveness.
In summary…
Not all clients will see these same results — some may see even more impressive performance. Or quicker results. Each industry is unique. Each team and budget is unique, and what works for one won’t work for all. That’s why we focus on really digging in up front to determine the right path for long-term success.
We’re happy to highlight the success of our client here and look forward to continuing the positive trends and helping them grow their business to new levels. As well as seeing photos of the tree house they’re building for their son.