SEO Paired With PPC Results.

Overview & Challenges

A long standing national printer wanted to increase their online traffic, leads and sales by 15 percent. Given their budget, the client expected 20 solid sales lead every month from Merkatus Media's Internet marketing efforts. The client was very effective at following up with leads, and many of them. Before initiating an Internet marketing campaign, the client relied on an outside sales force to travel throughout the country to generate sales, which made it very difficult for them to target medium sized businesses, businesses and businesses outside of large DMAs..

The client wanted to increase their online presence to generate more sales through the Internet while at the same time decrease those travel expenses. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and Call Tracking were the best strategies to achieve their goals.
Prior to contacting Merkatus Media, the client had basically no online presence. When they started investigating the power of SEO, PPC and Call Tracking, they realized that a very small percentage of their website was optimized, and they had no real way to track what was happening on the site. They had little experience running paid online advertising, and they did not have highly developed internal procedures in place.

Mobirise

800%

EXCEEDED GOALS BY OVER 800%

12%

EMPLOYEE HIRING INCREASED BY 12% TO KEEP UP WITH CORPORATE GROWTH.

The Strategy...

SEO - In SEO, content is king. A website filled with rich, unduplicated content is a valuable resource. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, analyze websites and rank them based on the quality of the content they publish. The client had little to no content on their website. Because their site lacked relevant content, the search engines didn't know what their website was about; therefore, they did not achieve the search engine ranking results they desired.


The client was, essentially, relegated to search engine oblivion, which lies beyond page 3 in the search engine results. Our SEO experts launched an aggressive SEO campaign, wrote optimized, keyword- rich content and built an XML article database for the search engines to crawl. Hundreds of keywords were identified; scores of those keywords were targeted by the content on the website. Our SEO team implemented a three-stage strategy consisting of optimizing existing pages; writing keyword articles and building a database, thereby integrating SEO into the client's business processes. With these stages outlined, the client had visible objectives and benchmarks by which to judge the effectiveness of their SEO campaign. 

PPC – For any SEO campaign to truly be effective, it takes time and commitment. However, to get a jump-start on keywords and to begin generating steady revenue, a Pay Per Click campaign was launched that proved very lucrative and covered the expenses associated with the SEO investment. Diligent keyword research lead to immediate qualified leads arriving via the website and helped bring the company online success. Ongoing optimization, ad refinement, and proper comparison A/B testing helped to streamline the account and make it more cost-effective than originally thought possible by the clients. Once thought of as a temporary measure until SEO kicked in, PPC has proven so cost effective that it is now an integral part of the client's marketing strategy.  

Results...

The outcome of our Internet marketing campaign achieved astronomical results and exceeded the client's expectations. After our initial keyword analysis, we identified 284 keywords with solid search traffic – the client ranked for none. Together, the client and the SEO team identified the most important keywords to pursue from that list. Today, we have earned page 1 rankings for hundreds of keywords, including some new terms identified via the PPC efforts. SEO alone resulted in a steady stream of qualified leads – Internet users who visit the site and become a lead.

Since the optimization process, the client has seen a 473 percent increase in online traffic (unique visitors) and an ever greater increase in online sales and lead generation. Instead of the 20 leads a month expected by the client, our efforts now net the client a steady 40 to 50 leads in a typical week – 8 to 10 times the number of leads they set as their original goal.
While increasing their monthly sales leads, we have managed to reduce their PPC budget by 20 percent from annual projections. In fact, whenever the client finds work loads to be too high, they dial down their PPC spend, giving them both a huge boon to their profitability, and the ability to manage their growth. The client chose not to replace one of their outgoing sales people, opting to turn to Merkatus Media to make up for the lost leads. Despite a downturn in the economy, the client has broken sales record after sales record, and has had no less than 4 months since joining Merkatus Media they had the best month in their 25 year history. Today, the client has 50 full-time employees, six of which were hired as a result of the supplemental growth triggered by their PPC and SEO efforts.

Through our solid relationship with the client over the last two years, we also have helped them explore niche markets that have resulted in more revenue. Through call tracking efforts using CallTraxPlus, we have been able to track online and phone leads to improve their internal process to handle those leads, which is among the best in their industry. The client relationship with Merkatus Media not only provided them with a great Return on Their Investment (ROI), but it also helped them to refine their thinking on certain aspects of the business, which has helped them grow and remain exceptional leaders in their industry.

POWERED BY MERKATUS | MEDIA 2018