Traffic + Conversions = Sales!
Find out how the Exposure Ninja SEO team secured record keyword visibility for a local accountancy firm.
1. Background
This accountancy firm is local to Milton Keynes and wanted to improve their visibility in the area.
2. Objective
The objective was to improve the organic visibility of the website through continued SEO work, partnering with our Content Marketing team to build the site’s authority.
3. Strategy
Since October 2014, we’ve redesigned the client’s website, regularly created new site content (mostly blog posts), increased brand awareness and picked up lots of links to the site through a combined effort from our SEO and Content Marketing teams.
4. Results
Here’s what we achieved:
- Increase in keyword visibility of 900%.
- Increase in total Google page 1 and 2 positions from 4 in October 2014 to 36 in July 2017.
- Increase from a total of 5 referring domains in October 2014 to 218 in July 2017.
- Increase from a total of 12 backlinks in October 2014 to 3,687 in July 2017.
Increase in Keyword Visibility of 900%
In order to increase sales, more traffic must be generated. For more traffic, an increase in organic visibility is required.
When working with a smaller, yet localised micro-company, the range of targeted keywords that aim to rank highly should be minimised. This is due to the narrowed-down range of phrases which a potential customer may use to find a company or their services.
In the case of a company in the accounting sector, that small range will encompass all types of phrases, from “small business accountant in location” to “location bookkeeping services”.
With this particular client campaign, we focused on a small range of only 20 to 30 phrases to earn increased ranking for, as these would deliver the biggest benefit for our client.
As with all location-based keyword phrases, it can be quite hard – and is increasing in difficulty – to rank on the first page for them, let alone in the first three positions. However, given the ongoing campaign we had planned out for this client, we were well aware that, whilst hard, these achievements would be more than possible with the right strategy in place.
Our strategy was simple:
- To increase brand awareness through outreach work orchestrated by our Content Marketing team
- To utilise those opportunities for backlink creation and validation of the services on offer
- To utilise Local SEO principles to improve directory listings – for increased authority in the sector – and to increase the referral traffic those trusted directories continually deliver
Within the first few months of the campaign, the SEO team optimised the website so that it was ticking every actionable ranking factor we have control over. This included improvement of titles, internal links, image optimisation and other important factors, such as metadata creation/optimisation.
During those first few months, keyword research was carried out which delivered the best phrases to build a framework of content around, carried out by our Content Marketing team.
Over the following two-and-a-half years, we produced lots of content for the website written around these phrases. Some of it was written as blog posts and some was published on websites that focus on the same subject – or closely related subjects. We also focused on writing about the problems many of our client’s customers would encounter – and as a result they would search for answers online.
The content produced and published on other websites has had three large contributing factors to the overall success of this campaign. Those three factors have been:
- The topic and contextual relatability of the offsite content to the services on offer
- The text used for the backlinks (anchor text) used within the content, aiding Google’s knowledge of what a website offers
- The increased quantity of referring domains and backlinks to the client’s website
Relatability + Anchor Text + Backlinks = Rankings Increase
The benefit of this cross-team effort to move the needle for rankings was gradual, effective and refreshed when required, to ensure that positions gained were further cemented into place through stronger SEO and Content Marketing work.
The results are most evident in the total top-20 positions increase, which started as a total of 4 in October 2014 and, at the time of writing, stands at 36 – with those phrases in the top three positions potentially delivering an approximate average of over 1000 visits (depending on the time of year).
900%
INCREASE IN TOTAL KEYWORD VISIBILITY
The Key Fundamental for Increases
Whilst the increased optimisation of the website and work to increase backlinks are fundamentals for success, time is also a really important factor here.
As the graphs for keyword visibility and total backlinks show, actions taken don’t necessarily yield immediate results. In some cases, they can but, in many cases, patience is required to see the full fruit of any SEO work to be enjoyed.
Optimisation of the metadata of a site might not bring immediate benefits today, for example, but in a month or so from now, the click-through rate may really start to take off.
New content published on the site might not deliver rankings and traffic tomorrow, but it may start to deliver those after three or four months of patience.
Backlinks created via publishing on another website may not bring immediate ranking improvements next week, but they might bring some immediate referral traffic that can be converted. They also give Google another opportunity to research and assess what the linked-to website is all about.