Back in July 2016 SunCity received a request for SEO/SEM services from a business (we’ll call it ABC Company due to confidentiality agreements) looking to increase sales and “amp up” with digital marketing. After a brief audit of their website it was apparent that not much had been done by the previous marketer in terms of SEO. While ABC Co was getting traffic from paid ads the CPC (cost per click) was cutting into the company margin and increased competition was making it more difficult to compete and made it apparent that the SEM (search engine marketing, Display and search) campaign was not a viable long term strategy. As such our first advice was to start creating valuable content and engage prospective clients via social media, blogs and other organic channels. SunCity worked with ABC Co. to create a list of target keywords related to their product. They sold both B2C and B2B directly and also wanted to explore relationships with distributors.
SEO Problems
- Almost no social media followers (80 on Twitter)
- No Organic Traffic
- Low conversion rate (under 1% while the median for e-commerce is 1.84%) for visitors
- No Content generation (blog writing, infographics, social media posts, white-papers)
- A highly restricted budget ($1000/month)
SEO Strategies
Since ABC Co. sold direct to consumers SunCity identified an education marketing campaigns one of the most likely candidates for a high ROI (return on investment) strategy. Social Media is exceptional for this type of marketing and we began with a targeted follower increase tactic to ensure that any content produced was actually getting to the market. This involved a couple different tactics sequenced for maximum effect:
- Target active social media users on Twitter and Facebook- This does not mean following anyone and everyone but instead identifying users who are engaged in content that matters to ABC Co. thus creating a following that cares. This is a huge benefit over simply spray and pray that the followers you acquire are interested and delivers a higher ROI. Once a substantial base is formed we switch to a more content driven approach in the next tactic.
- Generate a steady stream of content that was informative to the consumer and demonstrated their products superiority to others. Since we already have a follower base we can now deliver content that matters and back off of targeted increases to rely more heavily on organic follower growth generated by the content quality.
These two tactics allowed us to increase traffic and lead quality with relatively low effort and thus high ROI.
The Results
After deploying these two tactics ABC Co. realized huge gains in conversion rates, 4.1% which places them in the top 25% of e-commerce sites. All this was accomplished without PPC ads, and while time is not free the long term implications of this type of strategy are huge. The graph of followers shows how front loading strategy one can deliver huge gains for keyword ranking in a relatively short time when compared with standard SEO tactics. While tackling both of these (targeting followoers and website content generation) at once yields the highest gains these results demonstrate the ability to achieve results on a restricted budget. Strategic sequence is crucial to success with limited budgets.
Conversion rates, which are driven by how well a call-to-action or webpage is designed, make a huge difference. Just through good design and achieving higher conversions you can boost returns by 100-425%
Ivan Reed, CEO
Ivan Reed is the CEO of SunCity Advising. His client portfolio includes successful partnerships with startups, small businesses, medium-sized firms & large corporations. SunCity Advising specializes in developing high performing websites, including services in SEO, paid media advertising, social media, email marketing and other digital marketing solutions.
