Six Years Of Traffic Growth Results In An Attractive Company Sale – SEO Case Study
Back in 2013 we started working on this client’s SEO with an objective of increasing the number of enquiries (Goals in the chat below) from people finding our client via organic search results i.e. not paying for every client. This specific client was gaining the majority of its sales from their pay per click campaigns (we also ran for them) which was working well but SEO is much cheaper to source clients from.
We started with a full SEO Technical Site Audit to see if the basic fundamental SEO aspects were implemented, what competitors were doing, which keywords we wanted to rank for and checking the useability of the website. From this initial audit we pulled together a strategy of what to focus on for the coming months. The client in question sells new vehicles online.
We will keep the exact numbers confidential but will disclose the % increases.
Over 6 years SEO traffic has increased by 320% and enquiries has increased by 700%!
In the first year and after diligently working through our plan and keeping in constant contact with the client to ensure new vehicles and industry developments were being covered by the website we achieved a +60% increase in traffic but more importantly +86% increase in enquiries.
The website had approx. 800 pages at the start of 2014 and our approach is to optimise the pages that bring in the money first, then systemically work through the whole site whilst ensuring new pages are fully optimised. In the second year of working with the client we achieved a +23% increase in traffic and again most importantly a +26% in enquiries.
Google is ever evolving and releasing new updates to try and improve the search results for users. When working on clients sites we implement SEO which has long term benefits also known as white hat in the industry.
Organic Traffic and Lead Increases 2013 - 2020
However, even with this ethical approach, good websites can sometimes be penalised with new Google software releases meaning we have to recover lost ground. This was the case in the third year where although traffic was flat, we suffered a 24% decline in enquiries. This was obviously a worry for us and the client but by understanding the Google update impact and making changes to the website, we bounced back the following year with a +44% increase in traffic and +52% increase in enquiries.
In the fourth year of working with the client we were fairly embedded in their organisation and really seen as an extension of their marketing team. It was in this year that we achieved the biggest gain of a 73% increase in traffic and a massive 123% increase in enquiries. This was also the year that the business was sold to new owners and we helped in the due diligence process to ensure the new owners new what they were buying. The founder walked away with just under £10m and we are very proud of our contribution to the success of this business.
However, we never sit still and admire our success so we continued to work with the new owner while they found their feet. The first year was a little bumpy with the business focus moving away from the core website and centralised marketing departments taking charge of the UK operations.
With the sale of the business reaching the mainstream media, new and existing competitors heavily invested in their website activity and with the pool of customers fairly fixed, we took a dip in performance. With SEO the focus of our work is always on getting more enquiries. Traffic is usually what clients ask for but what they actually want is enquiries/sales. In the first bumpy year with the new owners traffic dropped by 17% but enquiries only fell by 7%.
In what is the final and 6th year of this case study (they are still a client) and the arrival of Coronavirus, we had been able to further optimise the site and implement a new content strategy for which we provided the content for. This not only achieved a +7% traffic increase but a +massive 41% in enquiries proving the point that its better to have good visitors than junk traffic that does not result in sales.
To summarise, in the 6 years we’ve been working with the client the SEO traffic has increased by 320% and the magic money making number of enquiries has increased by 700% which definitely contributed to the just under £10m business sale. We continue to enjoy working with the new owners and they appreciate the in-depth knowledge we have of their business and the industry as a whole which is what we strive for with our long term partnerships.
If you would like to chat with us to see if we can do the same for your SEO campaign and organic traffic then give us a call on 01256 517473 or use the contact form.