The practice of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no longer a new-fangled trend. It’s been a serious marketing practice for over 20 years. SEO is getting along in years. It’s old enough to grow a beard, or buy a drink at a bar — it can drive, and boy does it have wheels.
Rather than showing its age, SEO has proven that it is here to stay. In 2018, Forbes estimated the SEO market to be worth some $80 billion dollars. For those who think of SEO as little more than a few blog posts and some hyperlinks, it’s a fair question to ask where all that money is going.
One thing is for sure: for the companies investing their SEO budget in the right agencies, that money is coming straight back into their pockets many times over.
Take the example of what an agency known as My SEO Sucks did for one of their clients, a local law firm. They helped their client breakthrough into competitive search rankings, helping to boost their web traffic by 1,115% and their leads by 1,271% in just one year, creating a business where 85% of leads came from search engine traffic.
How did they do it? Let’s take a look.
SEO Starts On-Site
Every good SEO strategy starts with some technical details. To make search engine optimization truly effective, a website needs to be properly formatted and brought up to standards with what modern search engines expect to see. This is a process of making a website “machine readable.” While you probably designed your website mostly with humans in mind, it’s equally important to optimize the page for traffic from so-called “web crawlers,” the robots which patrol the internet for pages to populate search results.
My SEO Sucks’ first goal was to improve their client’s existing website by optimizing meta tags, adding relevant keywords to images, adding important keywords to their existing content, and making sure they were using search-friendly URLs.
Next, they began to work on some improvements which would benefit both human and robot traffic: they optimized the Page Speed. How quickly a website loads affects both how it ranks in search engines and how people use the site. They managed to take their client’s website from an average of 8-15 seconds to load a page down to a snappy 2 seconds per page. All by utilizing common techniques such as a Content Delivery Network (CDN), caching, and swapping to a better web host.
Hoping to make the most of all the traffic they were planning to generate, My SEO Sucks added a real-time chat window and a calendar which enabled potential clients to instantly schedule and appointment right from the website. These two features would prove instrumental in helping to convert all of their new traffic into real leads.
Content Creation
In order to attract search traffic, a website needs content. It needs something which can play host to important keywords and provide value to the user. To this end, My SEO Suck performed extensive keyword research with two key focal points:
- Intent-Based Keywords: These are keywords that suggest that the user is searching for information they intend to act on, either buying a service or ordering a product.
- Localized Keywords: By adding the names of cities and towns where their client was operating, My SEO Sucks managed to cut through a huge swath of competition while simultaneously delivering the sort of highly targeted search traffic which caters to real leads.
After extensive keyword research, My SEO Sucks began creating 4-5 blog posts a month focused on useful and informative topics with keyword-rich headlines and content. They targeted long-tail keywords and quickly took their client’s website from having just a few keywords in the Top 100 search results to over 3,000.
Moving to Off-Site SEO Efforts
In modern SEO, backlinks are solid gold. A backlink is a link to your page from another site. When these links come from reputable websites, search engines view them as a sort of positive “vote” for the quality of the website being linked to.
With a comprehensive link building and digital PR strategy, My SEO Sucks performed extensive outreach, sending out thousands of emails to potential collaborators. This targeted effort managed to secure their clients’ backlinks on top websites like newswire.net, monash.edu, and dozens of other sites.
At the same time, the My SEO Sucks team managed to get their client’s law firm mentioned on the websites of some of America’s leading universities, including:
- Harvard
- Stanford
- Cornell
This digital PR strategy not only built authority and relevance in the eyes of search engines but also gave a real reputation boost and social proof to the client’s law firm, showcasing their credibility and reassuring potential clients.
The Results
Just a few months after beginning their campaign, My SEO Sucks was already generating a positive return on investment for their client. These weren’t just subtle improvements, either. Look at this data comparing a 30-day period to the client’s traffic from the previous year:
By every metric, this campaign was a smashing success. The client was getting more traffic, more leads, and generating more revenue than before.
Hardly a fluke, this is something that My SEO Sucks does for their clients every day. For experts in the search engine optimization space, the path to boosting a client’s digital presence has been refined down to a science.
With clear goals and the help of experts, these results can be replicated for any business.
