Creating An SEO Brand: A Digital Marketing Case Study
As a top San Francisco digital marketing agency, Colibri Digital Marketing has a strong understanding of local San Francisco marketing techniques as well as experience creating and developing digital brands for San Francisco’s very specific market. In this digital marketing case study, we’ll be describing that process in detail, sharing how our agency made the difference for a brand that was not on the first page for its own name to a brand that received 1,800 web visits last month.
The Client
The client is a San Francisco car dealership. A high-profile business, they largely depend on elite name recognition, brand awareness, and customer testimonials and referrals, taking in most of their profit from fewer, higher-value sales. For this case study, we’ll call this client Luxury Car Dealership San Francisco. We began working with the client in November of 2016.
The Problem
When the client contracted us, they had no digital marketing presence. In fact, they were not ranking even for their own brand name, let alone for more general auto industry terms and keyword phrases. There were no systems in place to track the results of their various marketing efforts, nor to track their analytic data in general. In effect, they were flying blind, with no clear way to measure success or to troubleshoot issues with their digital brand.
Digital Marketing Strategy
Keyword Plan
Our first step was to develop a keyword plan for their digital marketing presence. We generated a list of several hundred keywords with Google’s Keyword Planner and, by running that list through Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool and collating the results in a single table, we came up with a diverse dataset of keywords.
Some of these keywords would, of course, be better than others, so we pared out any keywords which were too broad, misleading, or seemed unlikely to have conversion potential, leaving us with a comprehensive list of appropriate keywords for our client’s brand. These keywords included the brand itself, but also San Francisco specific auto industry keywords like the names of certain neighborhoods, and long-tail specific search strings such as “buy a car in San Francisco” or “selling a car in San Francisco”.
With this list in hand, our next step was to put these specific keywords to use.
Website Optimization
Using our keyword list to inform the direction of new web content, we began to optimize their website to target those keywords appropriately. Per SEO best practices, our SEO copywriters integrated them into the text, wrote optimized title tags and meta-descriptions for each page, as well as images, headers, and so on.
While this will be second-nature to any digital marketers in the audience, the gist of website optimization is incorporating your keywords such that, when the site is indexed, they are easier for crawlers to find so that the site can start to rank for them. If this is your first foray into digital marketing, we’ve got a whole series of posts on SEO for digital marketing, and we’d suggest you start with our two-part rundown on Technical SEO .
SEO Editorial Calendar and Weekly Blogging (3 Months)
With the site fully optimized, our next step was to generate new content to target particular key phrases in greater depth, giving the site a broader appeal and reach. We drafted an editorial calendar, pulling from our keyword list, and wrote the first three and a half months’ worth of blog posts.
Each post targeted a specific theme, keyword, concept, or location, thereby allowing for multiple points of entry for a prospective customer to enter a conversion funnel.
AdWords (3 Months)
While the freshly SEO-optimized site began to gain some traction, and the blog posts began to draw a readership, we turned our focus to a paid ad campaign with Google AdWords.
This campaign was extremely successful, running from November 2016 through to the end of January of 2017.
What you see above reflects a full 3 months of data, and you’re right to notice that impressions and clicks have different axes, and so impressions has been scaled (by an order of magnitude at least), but what’s key here is the relationship between the two. In fourteen discrete instances, the ratio of clicks to impressions increased above standard, suggesting that the ads were particularly successful, compelling, and resonant.
Tracking Rankings and Analytics
During this period we were also tracking the client’s rankings and metrics (traffic, bounce rate, session duration, etc.) We put a particular focus on new, over returning, traffic to track whether our brand outreach campaigns were generating new conversions.
Results
In the first week of our monitoring, the client’s site received 11 clicks. A week after that, it was 84. The third week, it was 312. The following month, they were averaging about 36 discrete sessions per day, and each of those sessions averaged about 4 distinct page views.
This kind of growth was exactly what we wanted to see.
Our outreach and optimization more than paid off, as we saw that traffic jumped almost immediately, but we also saw that users were engaged and committed, viewing multiple pages rather than simply bouncing away.
Where Are We Now?
Today, our client is thriving. With a full 1800 discrete sessions in March of 2017, and almost a full third of their traffic coming from returning users, it’s clear that our digital marketing campaign has been a success.
We’re in the business of accelerating success for visionary brands. We take pride in helping clients with their digital marketing needs while maintaining a focus on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. For more news, updates, and case studies, keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter feeds, if you’d like to be kept in the loop!
Colibri Digital Marketing
We’re a digital marketing agency that focuses on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. Based in San Francisco, we’ve got our fingers on the pulse of Silicon Valley, we’ve got an insider perspective on the tech industry, and we get a sneak peak at the future of digital marketing. If you’re ready to work with San Francisco’s first and only full-service B Corp-certified digital marketing agency, drop us a line or click below to schedule a free digital marketing strategy session!
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Originally published at colibridigitalmarketing.com on April 21, 2017.
