Results roundup – what had an impact this month?

We’ve had lots of great news to share with clients in our monthly reporting meetings. 

• A content-led acquisition strategy boosts organic traffic by an incredible 336% YoY
• A local PPC strategy achieves conversion rate 24% above forecast
• Good understanding of user intent boosts non-homepage conversions by 100%
• CRO data reveals how it has strengthened a website’s performance over 18 months

Proof that even a modest SEO content retainer has impact

We produce a couple – just a couple – of high quality thought leadership pieces for a client every month. Keywords are a consideration, but these pieces are all about showing and sharing their expertise and authority.

Hand-in-hand with this is a ruthless but fairly modest technical SEO agenda. 

They’ve had us on retainer for a little over a year – we onboarded this client in lockdown. The SEO data showed uplift after three months – unsurprising, because despite their size, they hadn’t had a retainer like this before. 

And they have flown. In the last month:

• Organic traffic is up by an incredible 336% YoY
• Pages per session also saw a 10% YoY increase and 7% MoM increase

 OK, I’m cheating a bit

Actually, this isn’t the full picture. We also built them a new website – but only once the SEO content strategy had collated the data we needed to prove the business case.

This is a rough timeline of what happened:

• SEO and content kick off
• Monthly reporting and audits
• Website build and content migration
• Post-live content audit
• Increased content activity to implement quality recommendations over 4 months
• Continued SEO content during this time 

Why didn’t we just recommend a website from the get-go? Yes, we knew that they did need a better website but it was a largely subjective, gut instinct opinion. 

Improving and measuring over a six-month period proved to them the spend was justified and it informed the website development, so when we launched, they got a much better product too.

336% though. It’s an amazing demonstration of what even a modest content and SEO retainer can achieve. 

Needless to say, we’re plotting ways to beat this ASAP. The client is too busy to meet with us this month because they’re too busy onboarding new clients and recruiting. We’ll just get on with it and let you know how it goes.

Local PPC strategy achieves conversion rate 24% above forecast

This client generates leads via its website through PPC only, so it’s essential they get a good ROAS. 

This month, we’ve seen a conversion rate of 4.11%, which is 24% ahead of forecast, and a universal increase in conversion rate across all local campaigns.

How have we done this? 

The UK is easing its response to the pandemic, which might be a factor in encouraging people to start engaging with the architecture sector generally.

However, this is a competitive sector with a specific, high earning target demographic, so our PPC manager has worked hard to help the client make an impact.

• She’s maintained a good conversion rate through ongoing ad copy changes, keyword bid adjustments and cleaning up SQR.
• She’s shifted budget towards the brand campaign to support social campaigns.
• She’s bright down the CPLs to a really good low level.

To build on this success, she’s going to:

• A focus on the location campaigns with the aim of lowering the CPLs further. 
• Exploring options for new location campaigns.

A surefire way to know content is targeting user intent

You can tell if an SEO and content strategy is working when your homepage traffic is overtaken by non-homepage traffic. It means that organic traffic is being directed optimally.

1. User searches with the intent of finding information
2. Google serves up the most relevant results for this query – it might be a page about a specific topic or a product page for e-commerce
3. Users click through, find what they need
4. SEO, content and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) work together to make a conversion based around this intent

For this client, in a very competitive sector that is driven by lead generation:

• Non-homepage conversions are up by a very impressive 100% YoY
• Non-homepage sessions are also up by 48%
• Homepage sessions are down; however our conversion rate and actual conversions are up by 87% and 42% respectively.  

Also,  the wider picture shows that between last month and this, our client appeared in 40,000 more searches and, YoY, the click through rate has increased by an incredible 1% (one percentage point increase).

Why does this matter?

Homepage traffic is often a good barometer of brand searches and therefore an indicator of:

• Brand awareness
• The success of PR campaigns
• Above the line activity
• And so on

So, getting more homepage traffic in this sense is good, but targeted SEO content should be directing traffic to relevant content.

18 months of monitoring CRO shows organic impact

Before we sign off for this month, it’s worth taking a look at the long term value of investing in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

The premise of this performance marketing service is that it shows the changes you can make to your site that have a positive impact on your conversions (and conversions = profit = growth).

What is CRO marketing?

It’s the process of testing variants and seeing which layouts, colours and copy encourage your visitors to convert.

With CRO, you can say goodbye to arguing about aesthetics and wasting money on subjective opinions. It’s only the data that counts.

What have we seen?

Over 18 months, our client has steadily invested in a wide ranging programme of testing across the entire site. 

This month:

• The organic conversion rate increased slightly to 4.20%
• Organic traffic conversion rate increased from 1.73% last month to 1.90% 

And this is the picture over the last 18 months. You can see the steady improvement.

Takeaways

• Organic performance should be led by content
• It’s not the size of your budget but the quality of your strategy (and content)
• There’s always work to be done to lower PPC costs per click
• CRO is a long term strategy that saves time, money and builds a stronger site

Door4 is all about revenue optimisation – success, growth, rinse, repeat. If you’d like to know more about what this could do for you, get in touch.

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Photo by Vlad Vasnetsov from pixabay (edited)