Recently, I was analyzing a client’s Google Analytics account with them and we discovered since they redesigned their website, this happened (shared/anonymized with permission):
Now, this isn’t a brag post or a sales post, but rather a lesson in being:
1) extremely cognizant of your capacity and strengths and
2) creating a plan and sticking to it.
This client had a singular, focused goal of bringing in more organic traffic for their most profitable service.
This is a great starting point because focus makes all the difference when creating an SEO strategy.
They offer many services but there’s one that is what we call “bread and butter” service, so it made sense to build the website and search strategy around that service.
Secondarily, we wanted to help reduce their workload by making it easier for people to immediately take action. They received a lot of confused inquiries that were from people who didn’t need or didn’t have the budget for the sort of service they offered.
Bad leads from the search engine are as problematic as no leads at all—they take up time and resources that you don’t have.
This particular client is fantastic on social media but struggled to find enough time to do much more than that, due to the nature of their work—rh. Actually sitting down at a computer doesn’t happen a lot, but a phone is always available. So, knowing that, they wanted to do as much as they could with search, but without doing our usual recommendation, which is building an SEO marketing funnel with articles and blogs.
But, we were able to work around that by adding some more substantive, “blog-like” content that made up for it, drilling down the keywords targeted on the main content pages, adding topical FAQs, and then de-indexing anything that wasn’t super relevant to those strategically-selected keywords and also focusing the backend optimization on those very carefully selected keywords.
We also rethought the flow of the site with those keywords and a very specific audience in mind, and every element of that design was checked against the singular goal of the website.
Once all of that was done, our team rewrote the main content pages, particularly targeting those keywords and the most profitable service they offered. Next, we observed that they’d been paying for some Google ads that targeted some keywords that weren’t really great for their target audience, so it could be diluting their brand. (This is where SEO/conversions/good ol’ brand strategy all intersect.)
Circling back to the client’s strengths, they rock at social media and while I’m an advocate for focusing your efforts on properties you own, social can be very effective at driving traffic to a website and building brand awareness. So, our client focused their social campaign on that highly profitable service.
The magic here is marketing alignment—any encounter with the brand, on socials, on the site, in the office, contains the same message and focus.
Can you see how all this keeps looping back to that singular goal?
This was all to help sell the profitable service more easily. Was this achieved overnight? Nope!
This was over the course of several months and we’d actually worked with this client for a few years. This latest work was a culmination of many conversations and strategy sessions we’d had since we first started working together.
Drilling down that goal is critical, and it takes time. And it takes following the plan and executing the steps consistently, tweaking as appropriate. We see so many people get frustrated with not seeing immediate “results” but when we dig in, we discover that the plan wasn’t actually followed.
Be realistic about what you can and cannot handle, what you’re good at and what you aren’t so good at (I’m terrible at a lot of things!).
Oh, and this was all done on a Squarespace website—a platform notoriously tricky for moving the needle in this way.
If you’re interested in working with our team on an SEO Strategy that goes way beyond the basics and produces measurable results, get in touch with us here.
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3 Responses
Hi Sarah,
Thank you for ithe invitation to ask questions!
I am one of those 2 audience people for the website I am building on Squarespace. I have discovered that I can write with the same message (and strong point of view) to both art world sophisticates and newcomers.
We have $85 (all inclusive price, priority mail) framed desk size digital prints designed to make my husbands fine art accessible to anyone for the price of a pair of slacks. Then we will have Original Fine Art which will
be expensive. Time will tell which will be the money maker. So according to your article, I should focus on one
for SEO and strategy. Any thoughts? Also, was I supposed to ask question here or on LinkedIn? Thank you. Warmly, Lenore
If it were me, I’d focus on the originals. It’s always easier to sell one expensive thing than 100 easy things. And, the originals will drive sales of the prints.
Thank you Sarah!