SEO Works – SEO Case Study

If the success of your business relies on website traffic, it’s worth investing in SEO to boost your organic listing.

And whilst best-practice SEO has changed considerably in recent years following Google’s various algorithm changes and intent to boost user-experience, get your strategy right and SEO can deliver a serious return on your investment.

Take a recent client of ours, Elite Titles.

Elite Titles suffered a serious fallout following the Penguin update back in April 2012. Organic traffic plummeted, followed by sales. Founder, Andrew sought our services attracted by the promise of page 1 visibility for selected keywords.

After working on his site, the turnaround was clear. From a sales perspective, between October 1st – December 31st 2014, his sales were up 57% compared with the same period in 2013. He said, ‘With respect, I never thought I would see “1” again on a Google ranking!  This is an awesome result, thank you.’ 
A premier New York agency that commissioned titles as part of an awards dinner also found Elite Titles – all through the power of Google organic search.

Over the same period, traffic to the site increased too:

• Visits increased by 187.27% from the same time period last year: 50,951 v. 17,736. What’s more, 40,064 of these visits were ORGANIC. That’s a 263.19% increase from last year.
• Page views increased by 174.00%
• Bounce Rate has decreased by 3.63% (Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page)

And just comparing December:

• In December 2013 he had 4,306 visitors as a result of people finding him in Google
• In December 2014 this had increased to 18,276 visitors

You can see these results in the Google Analytics screenshot below.

Here’s a breakdown of all the SEO work we did to achieve these results

1. Keyword research and content:

One important issue, which contributed to the site’s poor performance post-Penguin was it lacked focused information. The site also failed to incorporate the right keywords in order to be found for all the titles that could be bought.

As a result, Elite Titles wasn’t getting found. We took a long-term approach to addressing this fundamental flaw:

• We recommended that the site should capitalise on all the other titles as opposed to just Lord and Lady titles and wrote focused and informative copy for each.
• We researched the subject, the competitors, and identified the best keywords to target.
• More pages were added with quality and focused information to include relevant search terms that people were using to find his service – e.g. “How to become a lord”.
• We ensured all pages were fully optimised for search engines and users.
• We created a breadcrumb navigation trail to help users understand and navigate the site better. (Breadcrumb navigation shows the user’s path to their current location and they are also considered good SEO practice).

2. Blogging:

A blog allows you to easily add new and unique content and also provides content for tweets and Facebook updates. What’s more, sites that constantly produce extremely valuable content for its user base also tend do better in the search results.

• We added a blog to his site and helped with content creation.
• Andrew had lots of great stories from customers who had purchased a Title from him. These were turned into interesting blog posts and helped increase Elite Title’s visibility.
• Concerning the Seated Titles, Andrew wanted to make more of Dartmouth – where the land that is used is located. As the Queen met Phillip at the Naval College in Dartmouth, an article, which talked about this connection, was created – check it out here – http://www.elitetitles.co.uk/titles-with-royal-connections.html.

3. Conversion:
The site wasn’t converting into sales, which was Andrew’s key objective. So as well as fixing the SEO, we also looked at the conversion process to get more visitors clicking the buy button:

• Calls to action were added to sales pages.
• Site navigation was revised to help visitors find what they were looking for.
• Paypal and Nochex logos were added for reassurance and to build the trust and confidence needed to make a purchase.
• Testimonials were incorporated into the copy where appropriate.
• An abandoned cart reminder was introduced. As long as the customer had entered their email address, this meant Andrew could follow up people who didn’t complete the checkout. This helped nudge up conversions and was a relatively simple strategy to implement by creating an autoresponders sequence sent at specific time intervals.
• A Gift Certificate option was introduced, which customers could redeem at any time.

4. Errors were fixed:

• Code errors and the duplicate content issues were addressed to ensure Google and other search engines could index the site properly.
• A custom 404-error page was created as a ‘catch-all solution’. This meant if a visitor clicked on a broken or missing link, they are brought back to the business’s website. (All websites should have one as it helps with usability and increases user retention).

5. Site build

• XML Sitemap and Robots.txt file were created and uploaded.
• An optimised Google local listing for the business was written.
• Focused outreach secured relevant and quality backlinks.

 

The result

Keyword ranking increased substantially with most of Elite Title’s search terms appearing in the top 5 positions on page 1 of Google. This helped Elite Title’s organic visibility increase dramatically.

Visitors increased by over 200% from the same time period from the previous year.

Unit sales have increased by 20% in the first 6 months (which translates into a very worthwhile figure).

And the client can’t stop smiling!

The final word

“This is very pleasing from my point of view and more importantly you stopped the slide in unit sales (both services) of the last few years – I hate to think what the above stats would have looked like if we had not teamed up on this project…”

If you’d like to discuss how SEO could help transform your business we’d be very happy to chat. Simply contact us with your questions.