Client is a national human resources provider with around 1,000 customers. We had built their original website which we also hosted. In 2023 we took over their digital marketing efforts. They had a network of sales agents around the country and other marketing efforts growing their customer base, but their online marketing had gained no traction whatsoever.
Theirs is an industry dominated by several major players. In this scene they were small potatoes to billion dollar competitors. They were getting a good deal of traffic to their website, but little of it was coming from relevant organic searches. They had poor search engine rankings and little to no leads being generated by the website. The website had been re-built by the previous vendor, and many technical errors were interfering with its performance both with the search engines and site visitors.
We fixed the technical errors in the site and made other changes at the request of the client. Research was done to find highly relevant keywords with significant search volume. Recognizing that we couldn’t in the short term compete against billion dollar companies for the highest volume keywords, we concentrated on keywords that we felt were within reach.
From this we developed or, where they already existed, optimized for these keywords, and services pages. Each page had to be effective in garnering rankings but also impactful and effective to prospects reading it.
At the same time we developed precision metrics for measuring the results of our efforts. That included tracking keyword rankings, traffic to the site from searches for such keywords, and tracking valuable conversions (leads generated) from organic searches. This last metric “quotable organic leads” accurately measured improvement in the desired end result.
As we continued to work on the site, relevant search volume increased. Search rankings and leads increased on a steeply increasing graph. We accumulated enough of a track to identify the seasonal pattern that occurred and to take this into account in our analysis. Measurement and analysis also led to additional optimization of some existing pages, and addition of some additional pages to target keywords now found to be both valuable and attainable.
In the first full year of the program, the key metric “quotable organic leads” doubled, and despite the poor economy, increased by another 50% in the next year. Added to the stress of the economy, upheaval in search, with the rise of AI added to the stress of maintaining growth. We added new methods to track the effect of AI on the client’s online performance and made changes to the website accordingly.
The website now appears in 8 AI Overviews with a combined search volume of 9.8K searches. These AI Overviews are the new holy grail for search as they appear higher on the page than everything but, sometimes, paid ads, and are known as “Position 0” – better than a number 1 organic ranking. The site gets more valid organic traffic now than one MUCH larger competitor.
We have updated our strategy and while continuing the successful actions, we are now also focusing on achieving a better “conversion ratio” – website changes targeted at increasing the percentage of valuable traffic that becomes leads, rather than search rankings alone.
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