Info
- Industry :Automotive
- Service :SEO
- Timeframe :5 Months
Project Brief:
This is an automotive company in Texas. They focus on buying cars for cash so they can later resell them at their car dealership. The owner and I plan to expand nationwide.
Challenges:
Before we started working together, the owner of this company hired another digital marketing company for over 7 months without seeing any results. Luckily, they did issue a refund; however, this does not give him back the wasted time he had to deal with.
One of the most pressing issues I identified was that half of their site wasn’t even indexed by Google!
Most of his target keywords were not even in the top 100.
Here are some of the issues we found during our audit, which made a substantial difference in their results:
- Indexation Issues
- No Cohesive Internal Linking Structure
- Not Enough Quality Links
- Not Enough Content On Service Pages
- Not Enough Blog Content
- Needed An On Page Optimization Overhaul
- Not Ranking For Any Terms
- Not Enough Leads
Strategy
The first thing we did was run a complete audit of the site, which comprises of a 100+ checklist; this is one in which I’ve personally made from years of auditing sites – I can find things that many SEO’s wouldn’t even think of looking for.
After running the audit and analyzing the results (which took almost a week to finish), we prioritized and fixed both the major and minor issues to make sure the SEO campaign was build upon a solid foundation; this included fixing those issues stated in the “Challenges” section.
After a lot of effort, we were able to get the whole site to index!
Next, we dove into in-depth keyword research; this is the process for which we thoroughly research and identify the best search terms to rank, leaving no stone left unturned.
Using this information, we optimized each important service page to them, which involves reverse engineering the top ranking sites to determine what Google’s algorithm is favoring for that particular keyword, and based on our findings, we go back and finalize our data-backed optimizations, which proves to make a huge difference time and time again. These optimizations involve changes to the title tag, H1’s, sub-headers, body content, internal linking, and schema mark up.
After that, we knew that we needed to develop a robust content strategy to really beat out the competition. Building out topically related supporting content, when done the right way, helps convey to Google that you’re an industry expert. After building out the content calendar and posting on a routine schedule, and optimizing each blog post, we saw big ranking increases.
During that same period, we starting the link building campaign, which involves prospecting thousands of websites to identify potential sites we may want a link from, filtering the list down using very strict criteria, finding email addresses of the important contacts at each site, and pitching personalized emails to each one. We were able to land contexually relevant backlinks from very authoritive websites, which helped move the needle a lot.
We continued to test and refine the on page optimizations, built out the blog content, making sure we adhere to our standard “topic cluster” information architecture model, and acquired a vast amount of high quality backlinks to ultimately get this client the results they needed to continue to grow their thriving business.
Results
- 181.53% Growth In Organic Traffic
- Tripled Conversions
- 14 Keyword Increases
- A Very Happy Client
In the below charts, these very competitive terms were not in the top 100 when we started working together. Now a few are in the top 5, and the ones that aren’t yet are making consistent progress to get there. The starting points on the left of each graph signifies the first noted position being in the top 100.
