Businesses need more sales – one way to achieve this is through digital marketing. Search engine optimisation is the most popular method for this – driving more traffic to a business’s website. More traffic means more impressions, more signups, more purchases – more revenue.
To understand the strength of SEO and the value it provides businesses – we have developed a case study showing how SEO over a 12 month period can dramatically increase the numbers of visitors and follow-on sales to a business. I’m going to walk through how we built a site’s SEO strategy from the ground up — increasing the number of visitors 20-fold — and share key takeaways that you can apply to your own strategy.
The general outline of our strategy was:
- Resolve on-page issues to take advantage of “easy wins.”
- Focus on securing a handful of strategic links to important pages.
- Establish passive link acquisition channels to build momentum.
- Be intentional about content creation and its impact on search.
- Level up over time, and target higher-value opportunities.
Let’s dive into the case study.
Identifying the Opportunities and Challenges
This case study will revolve around Adelaide Broker, an Adelaide based mortgage broking brand which provides residential, commercial, personal and business loans. The SEO campaign timeframe for this case study is based on 1 January to 31st of December 2018 – however we will highlight some of the latest data as of the posting of this study to show even greater improvements.
Opportunities
Healthy niche for SEO – finance search volumes show significant consistent monthly volumes across a range of terms, from geographic searches for finance (ie “Mortgage broker in x suburb/city), different service related (personal loans, car loans, home loans) and product specific questions (self employed loans, investor loans)
Content – the website already had a large amount of content generated – with over 40 blog posts and information pages, however none of these were optimised
Initial Rankings – Whilst not ranking on page 1 for any core keyword terms, consistent rankings on pages 2-4 for a broad range of terms gave us a good starting point to work from
Challenges
Website loading speed– taking 7+ seconds to load from a combination of redirect loops, images which were not optimised and plugin bloat, this had to be fixed immediately
Trust – website did not have enough external trust, with limited external websites linking to the domain as a source
Content – duplicate repetitive content, poorly formatted with no SEO performed on titles, keyword density or well written snippets
SEO Implementation
With the opportunities and challenges identified – the SEO action plan was developed and implemented. To achieve the results we needed – we worked through the following:
On-page (changes made to the website)
Speed- optimised all images (reduced file sizes without reducing quality), removed unnecessary plugins including a bug filled chat bot which was not being used, but adding 2 seconds of load speed for every user, resolved redirect loops.
Result: Page load speed reduced from 7 seconds to 1.1 seconds
Content- removed duplicate content, reworked page titles to better reflect the content and related popular keywords, headings and formatting of content (tags, h1 headers etc) adjusted and rebalanced keywords to be natural instead of repetitive so that it would provide a better user experience.
Result: Rankings improvement and related pages ranking on Google, than just the home page. (personal loans page ranking for personal loans based searches etc)
Off-page (changes made external to the website)
Citations – placement of citations in trusted related local directories to assist with Google My Business location placement and link diversity
Links – promotion of content and services to aligned businesses, to secure syndication of content and attribution – growing the website as an authority on the topics delivered
Social Signals – promotion of the websites content through social media sources – Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn to generate enhanced brand awareness
Result: Extensive across the board improvements in rankings, increasing visibility and click-throughs exponentially.
Let’s see how the changes implemented improved through data directly from Google Analytics.
Results
Overall results over the 12 months have been exceptional, but let’s get through the numbers and we’ll expand on them below.
Keyword Rankings
1 January 2018– 0 keywords page 1
31 December 2018 – 92 keywords on page 1
Page Visits
January 2018– 31 unique visitors from organic Google searches
December 2018 – 194 unique visitors from organic Google searches
Leads generated
January 2018 – 2 leads generated
December 2018 – 25 leads generated
From the SEO strategy implemented at the start of the year, Adelaide Broker has seen an overall 525.81% increase in traffic, a 1,150% increase in leads and complete dominant positioning of the Adelaide Broker brand across local and national keywords for the services offered. With the average value per client for this business being between $2,500-5,000 – the SEO campaign for this Adelaide business has delivered an exceptional return on investment which will continue to grow as the brand develops further.
Notable other successes include being the number 1 ranked mortgage broking website in South Australia and prominent positioning within the Google My Business map listings without any paid Google Advertising.
[UPDATE] But wait – there’s more?
Currently 6 days into the 2019, we thought we’d check the statistics to see if there was any adjustments to the trends – and there was. Within the first week of January alone, Adelaide Broker received 97 new hits to the website – representing a doubling of traffic from its December peaks. This is in line with the latest positioning of the highest volume keywords rankings now positioned 1 – above ASX listed mortgage broking franchises and banks.
Interested to see how SEO can be used to help grow your business? Contact us today for a free discovery session so you can take your business to the next level.
