More traffic often equates to success in SEO. But what happens when that traffic doesn’t translate to increased revenue? This is the dilemma faced by one of our recent clients. Despite seeing a rise in website visitors with their former SEO agency, their revenue remained stagnant. The culprit? The wrong traffic. This is an issue we’ve come across time and time again. Let’s discuss how we’re tackling this issue head-on.
Conundrum
Our client’s site was attracting visitors, but these visitors weren’t converting. Why? Because the content wasn’t aligned with the audience’s needs or their stage in the buying journey. They were drawing in irrelevant traffic and missing out on those ready to make a purchase.
Assess and Restructure
Our first step in solving this issue is assessing the state of play and in most situations this results in an overhaul of content or full restructure. This process involves meticulously analysing the site’s existing content to determine what stays, what goes, and what needs tweaking. We’ll be looking at several key metrics over a period of 12 months or more:
- Impressions and Clicks: These basic metrics give us a sense of visibility and engagement.
- Conversions: Through tools like Google Analytics, Call Tracking and raw data through the CMS we measure what ultimately matters—actions taken by the visitors.
- H1s and Titles: Ensuring that the content is accurately titled and easy to understand.
- Top 3 Ranking Queries: Using a multitude of tools such as Search Console, BigQuery, Analytics and more to find what queries bring traffic.
- Quality Backlinks and Referring Domains: The quality and quantity of backlinks inform us about the page’s authority.
- Internal Linking: Understanding the site’s internal linking structure helps us optimise content flow.
Ideal Customer Profiling
Once we’ve reviewed the content, we focus on the audience. In this circumstance, we’ve identified two key personas:
- High-Intent Buyers: These visitors are ready to make a purchase and have a shorter decision-making process.
- Longer Sales Cycle Prospects: While these users take longer to convert, they are valuable leads that should not be overlooked.
Creating Targeted Content
With these personas in mind, we’ve created content tailored to each group’s needs and journey stages. This ensures that our messaging resonates with the target audience and drives action, whether it’s making a purchase or nurturing a lead over time.
Leveraging Paid Search Data
To further refine our strategy, we review the client’s paid search data. This helps us ensure that our SEO efforts align with the intent-driven keywords that are already performing well in paid campaigns. It’s about marrying SEO and PPC to create a cohesive and effective digital marketing strategy.
Competitive Analysis and Keyword Clustering
Understanding the competitive landscape is crucial. We’ve identified several key competitors ranking for relevant keywords that our client isn’t using a Gap Analysis. By clustering these keywords, we can create content that fills these gaps, building topical hierarchies that will improve our client’s ranking.
This process involves creating new pages and integrating them into a broader internal linking strategy. Prioritising the pages targeting high-intent buyers ensures we capture the most ready-to-convert traffic first. Low hanging fruit is a term often used in SEO campaign and we’ll start here.
Planning
Every campaign we run is bespoke, requiring substantial upfront work to scope and tailor strategies to our clients’ unique needs. It’s this customised approach that ensures our clients not only see an increase in traffic but, more importantly, an increase in revenue. Even with the best research, this is a process that may require several iterations to get right across the lifetime of a campaign. What’s important is fostering a mentality that’s always focused on results that matter. In the end, it’s about quality over quantity. By driving the right traffic, we’re not just increasing visitors – we’re increasing customers. And that’s the true measure of SEO success.
We’re happy to provide a free audit if you’d like to learn more – get in touch.