At Service Direct, we found that identifying our roadblocks and establishing new goals were the first steps to increasing our organic search by 348% in just 12 months. Our decision to invest in organic search has paid off in dividends, and we wanted to give some tips and tricks on what we did to achieve this milestone.
When you invest in organic search, you’re able to better understand your audiences’ intent through keywords, which leads to higher-quality prospects. Plus, organic search is much more cost-effective than paid campaigns, more trustworthy, and more sustainable. It’s well worth the time and money if your goal is to increase your ROI. There’s so much to gain from investing in organic search when you think of all the content that you’re constantly promoting.
Social media, blogs, and brand marketing are all consistent channels that will only increase organic traffic over time through organic search. Organic search will bring quality leads on an ongoing basis as you continue to rank without having to pay for it. You can take up more real estate on a search result page, and if you rank in the top 10 results, you’re more likely to get more traffic from that volume. Based on our results alone, we think investing in organic search is a no-brainer!
For starters, seeing the value of your organic search efforts takes time. It could take several months or longer to see results, but the long-term result will be well worth the wait, so patience is key. Another challenge with organic search compared to PPC campaigns is that there is really no "rule book" on how to rank for specific search terms. There are thousands of ranking factors that Google considers in their ranking algorithm, and they are changing it daily. But, when looking at the main buckets of ranking factors, we can typically group them into these categories.
Online advertising is constantly evolving and Google makes frequent updates that you’ll need to work with. On top of that, many keywords and search terms you want to rank for are very competitive, so it’s a bit of a trial and error process to find high-traffic keywords that don’t have quite as much competition. But with consistency and patience, the benefits of your time and effort will come.
In order to increase our organic traffic, we focused on two main things:
Sprucing up our content and website allowed us to create an easier user experience for our site visitors, drive down costs to acquire new customers, and establish trust by showing thought leadership in our industry. After about 4 months of website redesign and new content development, we reached our goals of creating a more reliable foundation to drive organic traffic and convert site visitors into real customers.
Key Performance Metrics (last 12 months)
We originally built our website in-house, which we soon realized was too inefficient and time-consuming for our developers who were busy with time-sensitive projects. In order to ensure our website was still getting the attention it needed to drive traffic, we made the decision to move to WordPress. This change allowed us to still be in control of everything from content to design without spending as much of our developer's time.
The four things we focused on for our website:
Technical Setup
New Target Keywords
Body Content
Meta Information
WordPress is easier to manage, and adding new pages, images, blogs, and formatting can be done quickly. There’s no HTML editing software required and if you want to add features like a Twitter feed or video gallery, you can easily do so with plugins, many of which are free. Once we made the switch, it was obvious that was the best decision for our business goals moving forward. The goal was to have our core site / vertical pages rank at the top of search results for very bottom-of-funnel keywords.
Site structure and architecture refer to how the pages are organized and linked together to create your website. The way your site is set up and structured is important for many reasons, some key reasons being:
Google passes a value from one page to the next through internal links and based on where the pages are located in the organization (hierarchy) of the website, pages will receive more or less of this value. You could have the most beautifully designed website around with all the bells and whistles, but without a structured website URL and sitemap, there’s no way to link your content in a way Google can understand. Your website URL plays an important role in user experience, ranking, and tracking analytics. Since the URL describes the content for both search engines and people, a well-structured URL with necessary keywords improves click-rate, limits bounce-rate, and ultimately helps people find your services. Additionally, a sitemap lists your website’s most significant pages making it easy for search engines like Google to find them and send bots to read through them. It also makes it easier for people to find a specific page on your website, which is essential when it comes to increasing traffic and generating leads.
Here are a few fundamental tactics we used when building our website from the ground up.
When we began our keyword research, we had to first establish reliable types of clients to focus our organic strategy on. Once we had more solid information on our clients and what they were searching for, we were able to discover what keywords generated the most traffic. By breaking it down into these two factors, not only were we able to recognize the most important content and pages to create for our site, but we were able to recognize which keywords not to include in our organic search strategy.
For example, our CGO Matt Buchanan explained that even though the term “insurance leads” receives a significant amount of traffic, but driving insurance leads isn’t a focus for us as a business, therefore it doesn’t make sense for us to spend time trying to rank for that competitive keyword phrase.
On the other hand, we were able to discover keywords that generated a lot of traffic and worked great for our business like ‘plumbing leads’, while at the same time did not have a ton of competition to rank. As a result, it made it easier for us to stand out and generate leads. Here is a quick list of what to include in your keyword research.
When you think about a user searching for something online, there are typically many different variations of search terms they will use that are focused on a keyword. For example, someone might search “plumbing digital marketing” whereas another person might search “lead generation for plumbers.” Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content (using a good mix of keyword phrases) should produce positive results.
Not only is the body content of your website important for establishing your business as knowledgeable thought leaders and creating your brand voice, but it’s also crucial for backlinking, improving your rankings, and ultimately attracting more users to your page.
Some core tactics we used to optimize our content for each page::
Meta information can make a huge positive impact on your SEO results when you follow best practices. Meta information basically includes two components: Title Tags (Page Titles) and Meta Descriptions.
This information is used to describe the content on your page to search engines and act as a first impression to your page. Effective meta information should be concise, clear, and use keywords to help people find you and the services they’re searching for online. Your meta information needs to be unique to each website page (no duplicates) and stay within recommended character counts in order to make them as useful as possible to both search engines and people searching online.
We conducted an audit of our current meta information for all website pages. Each website page was targeting a primary and secondary keyword, so we audited and updated all title tags and meta descriptions to ensure they were best optimized for those keywords.
Title Tags / Page Titles
Meta Descriptions
With 72% of marketers stating content marketing increases engagement, it’s not something you want to neglect. We found that by writing compelling content around our keywords both on our website and on our blogs, our traffic increased tremendously. We honed in on our website design keyword-driven landing pages, revisited our content marketing strategy, and focused on promoting our articles online in order to see better results.
As we looked into different strategies to increase organic traffic, one of our goals for content marketing was to write blog content that could rank for long-tail keywords that were more centered around the middle and top of the funnel to increase awareness. We also moved our blog over to a subdomain and focused on writing content that we could promote to get third-party mentions from other websites. We use Hubspot as our CMS and have adopted their pillar approach to blog content planning while focusing on keywords.
SEO-Focused Blog Articles: These are articles that are written around specific long-tail searches that we wanted to rank for. For example, instead of “plumbing leads” we targeted ‘“how to get more plumbing customers.” By focusing on long-tail searches, it’s much easier for us to rank for them due to the low competition. It’s also known to result in better conversion rates since people who search long-tail keywords tend to be more specific about what they are looking for. Plus, if you’re using Google Ads, they typically cost less to bid on!
Culture Articles: Our culture articles are centered on our company culture and sharing our experience and ideas to benefit other companies who might be interested in strengthening their community. These articles can be anything from our working from home strategies and how to create a virtual book club to how to set up a fun company wellness challenge. Posting culture articles is a great way to have consistent content that is relatable not only to your industry but to any business, therefore reaching a wider audience and having more opportunities for backlinks. Plus, if you’re trying to grow your team, job searchers will be able to gather a better idea of your company culture just by reading your blog!
Thought Leadership Articles: Thought leadership articles are a great way for your company to demonstrate its knowledge and expertise to establish credibility and share your insights with an engaged audience. For example, if you’re a marketing business, writing an article about SEO strategy based on your experience and explaining how others can follow your tips in order to grow their business would be a great thought leadership piece. As stated above, these pieces are great at building trust and credibility for potential clients and other businesses that may link to your website and drive more traffic to your company.
Promoting your content is a great way to get it indexed quickly by Google. It helps with rankings by getting mentioned on third-party websites as a resource. If you think of a backlink like a vote, you want to get authentic quality votes from the web, and the best way to do that is to create compelling content that people want to naturally link to and talk about. But quality content isn’t seen without consistent promotion. According to a study done in January of 2021, businesses using social media increased traffic by 79% and generated leads by 69%. So promoting on multiple social media channels is not something you want to neglect once your website is ready for its close-up!
Promote across channels
Promoting across channels is crucial to bringing awareness to your business. From an SEO perspective, promoting on social media will get your content indexed quickly because the fastest way for Google to crawl your new content is from social media. This is also the best way to get quick engagement with the article, which is important for rankings, as well as getting solid organic traffic from social channels and relevant communities with hashtagging.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when promoting on social media:
Promote content to relevant trade publications and blogs
Promoting your content to trade publications and blogs is a natural link building technique that allows you to build credibility in Google’s eyes. If you think of a backlink like a vote, then the more votes you have, the more popular and trusted you become. Bottom line, the more content you have on established platforms, the more awareness you’ll bring to your business, and the more credibility you’ll build for potential new clients.
Here are a few tips and tools we used for content promotion:
When it comes to increasing your organic search, you have to be in it for the long haul. But by applying the right strategies like ranking for quality keywords, sprucing up your website, and promoting your content across blogs and social channels, the payoff will be well worth the wait. As long as you know your audience and what they’re searching for, and continue to believe in your company and that what you have to offer is one of a kind, your audience will believe it too. Our biggest piece of advice: don’t give up!