Affordable SEO – Double Your Search Engine Traffic.

SEO and SEM can be very expensive, if you’re paying for sponsored content posts, freelancers to write quality content for your blog and taking out PPC and display campaigns the costs quickly add up.  However you can get improvements and results by exploiting every possible opportunity on your site. In the case study we are going to show how The Marketing Mix doubled the search engine traffic for one of our clients in a completely white hat way, without buying any links (something we don’t do) and without adding any new blog content.  The client, Tasman Oil Tools, is in a very competitive market providing downhole drilling tools, and oil and gas equipment for the international market.  Improving their SEO in a competitive market was always going to be a challenge. Although the results are not out the ball park, we are humbly please to see good improvement that has led to quality leads for our client.

The Results

Firstly let’s take a look at the results.  Keep in mind we’ve done this 100% white hat. We also haven’t built any new pages on the site.  This is simply the same content on the site but improved to rank better in search engines.  As can be seen we’ve more than double the search engine traffic in the past year with an increase of 118 per cent.

As mentioned this client is in the oil and gas industry.  So let’s take a look at some of their top performing keywords.

Oil Tools Companies -1

Oil Tools Rental – 2

Drill Pipe Rental – 4

Oil and Gas Tools -3

Sure that’s great. We’re really happy our client is ranking for some of these terms. But as we know SEO is more than one term. Did you know that 50-70 of Google Searches have no exact match keyword, and 20% have never been made before? Couple that with increased personalisation it’s getting harder to rely on keyword data to match keywords with SEO performance.  But combined with the increased traffic and other metrics such as views to contact pages we can be sure they are getting some good results.

The Cost Effective SEO Process

Step 1. Keyword Research

When The Marketing Mix took on this client the previous SEO was measuring and targeting very long tail keywords with almost zero search traffic.  The first step we made is to going after some terms with more search volume.  Sure it’s easy to rank for Roller Reamer Rental in Dubai – but if literally this is almost never getting searched, why would you want to?  For this reason we broadened the main search terms we were tracking and targeting. We wanted to make sure that we were targeting terms that were being searched and going to lead to sales. To do this we analysed how many searches per month and then cost per click from Google AdWords to assess profitability

Step 3 – Offsite SEO Analysis

The next step was checking over the link profile of this client.  The previous SEO had been doing some questionable practices in terms of link building such as adding comments in blog posts and article submission sites. Luckily most of the links were deleted by the blog moderators so there was no need to delete or disavow a bunch of links. In any case there was no evidence of a spam penalty from Google so we deemed the links at that level safe.

Moving forward The Marketing Mix in conjunction with the client embarked on a process of white hat link building strategies.  In most cases this involves either guest posting or creating a bunch of linkable content on the blog.  In this case hiring a content expert to write some blog posts for their site or guest post’s on behalf of Tasman would have been very difficult and expensive.  To combat this we embarked on leveraging the brand and networks to build links.

Unlinked Brand Mentions

Using tools such as Google Alerts we found a bunch of unlinked brand mentions. We contacted these mentions and asked them to link back to Tasman for attribution purposes. This resulted and quite a few quality back links back to Tasman.

Industry Specific Directories

Industry specific directories are a great way to build relevant high quality back links. Unfortunately in the oil and gas industry some of the directories are hugely expensive.  So we built a database of every single industry directory we could find and assessed the cost/benefit of purchasing a listing.  Any free listings we simply got (as long as it was a quality site). For paid listings most seemed to have little benefit. One we did go after was Rigzone, this was deemed suitable because it ranks for a bunch of terms associated that Tasman is targeting already. This not only resulted some high quality back links for Tasman, but it is worth them listing on this site on its own right.

Local Citations and Business Directories

Web based citations and directories help search engines verify the location of a business.  Tasman Oil Tools operates in multiple locations. For each location Tasman is based in local citations were built to improve the local business rankings. The key with this is to only build in a quality citation sites. Luckily for us we already compiled a list of high quality local business directories.

Summary

There you have it.  That wasn’t all the work that was conducted. We also had some issues with old domains redirecting incorrectly, some duplicate content issues, Google My Business listings that needed addressing, site speed, and more.  SEO isn’t about just one factor though, Google admits to over 200 ranking factors.   But here we’ve outlined the factors we feel had the greatest impact for this particular client.