Maytech tasked Liberty Marketing with devising a content-centric SEO strategy to enhance web traffic and improve free trial sign ups. Liberty Marketing tells us more about the project
Maytech is a global company providing secure data transfer across multiple industries, but specifically in the government, media and finance sectors.
The company’s website had recently been redesigned but wasn’t performing well on search engines, attracting visitors or converting traffic.
After meeting Liberty Marketing at a Figaro Digital event, Maytech contracted Liberty to devise a content-centric SEO strategy that enhanced web traffic and improved free trial sign ups.
Strategy
Liberty established that Maytech needed to refocus its core channels and, most specifically, inbound marketing.
Working with Maytech’s in-house digital marketing team, Liberty undertook a comprehensive audit of Maytech’s website and held a series of meetings with key decision makers to ascertain objectives and KPIs, and identify the personas of Maytech’s customers.
The audit included complete keyword research analysis. The keyword research consisted of two documents that analysed both short form and long tail keywords. The documents ascertained hundreds of keywords’ prospective search volumes, competition, ranking positions and URL rankings.
Liberty also analysed the current distribution of keywords on Maytech’s website, included an in-depth competitor audit and conducted market research of both internal and external environments.
This information was then used by Liberty to produce an SEO ROI forecasting model to form the basis of the initial SEO strategy, and also by Maytech to raise investment from financial backers. As a result, the assigned SEO budget was increased by 400 per cent.
Persona sessions were held to understand Maytech’s target customers. A number of individual personas were created, each of them with specific background information, likes and dislikes, challenges, trusted sources and goals.
This information would then be included in every single content piece—from onsite and offsite blogs to landing page copy—to inform the tone and maximise user engagement.
Execution
The findings of the audit enabled Liberty to map out all the main keyword groups to their own page, with the focus of each page being on a specific topic.
The dynamic keyword distribution was regularly updated to keep abreast of internal and external industry changes and new trends. Some keywords were de-optimised on certain pages, or moved to another, to reflect user behaviour.
These actions ensured the correct pages were ranking for the appropriate keywords. As a result, the amount of keywords indexed by Google was increased by 275 per cent, while the correct pages ranking grew by 340 per cent.
The persona sessions enabled Liberty to create a frequently-updated content strategy and calendar that provides both proactive and reactive content that’s relevant to Maytech’s target market.
Liberty’s in-house content team were responsible for the majority of the blog content, while IT industry experts were commissioned for specific technical pieces. The target market was reached through blogger outreach, engaging with IT industry influencers via social platforms and influential trade publications.
Result
After working with Maytech for one year, the project succeeded in a number of ways. Maytech’s referral traffic grew by 608 per cent in 12 months. Conversion rates of visitors starting a free trial (the main client objective) increased from less than 1 per cent to 4.5 per cent. What’s more, the project brought in more targeted, conversion-ready customer—users who progressed from a trial stage to purchasing a Maytech product increased from one in four to one in three.
Customer acquisition cost, a primary KPI, was under 12 months.
Overall, Liberty’s SEO ROI forecast has proved very accurate. Actual revenue targets closely resemble those forecast at the start of the process. This has been particularly impressive due to the variance in SEO forecasting metrics and external factors such as fluctuating search engine ranking methods.