SEO Case Study for Industrial Manufacturer Company - Increases Organic Rankings and Traffic
Company information and Current Marketing Strategy
This Industrial Automation company has been in business for 40 years manufacturing equipment for all forms of companies around the world. Since their inception they have grown their business into 14 countries and selling in to a further 30 countries. They have a turnover of over £25 Million and growing.
Currently their Marketing Strategy is strong. They have an ecommerce site with over 3000 products, an additional site for custom built products. They have relied on “Old School” marketing techniques which has incorporated posting out catalogues to new and existing companies to their database over 200,000 people. To this day, the paper catalogues still work and remind their customer that they are still present and ready to serve.
Customer Goals
Whilst the current strategy is effective more and more of their competition is outranking them for the important keywords in all industries. The goals are simple, increase rankings and traffic through On-Page Search Engine Optimization. Some of you are probably thinking, “What about Off page SEO? Building Backlinks?” Well, this will be coming but to be honest I have had great results with the on page!
The SEO is to cover all countries within the group including the USA.
Budget = The budget was fixed to 20 hours / month. This budget is limited however the client was aware that this would be a slow burner and that SEO does take time and to have an impact.
What Search Engine Optimization Strategy did we implement?
Well, firstly I decided to tackle each country a month at a time, continue to monitor them through Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Keyword Tracking Tools. Once the last country was complete, I would rotate and continue a second phase strategy starting with the first country.
The Strategy would incorporate the following and then some. Items below are just some of the main parts to the strategy.
- Site Architecture
- URL Structure
- Page Speed
- Page User Experience
- Duplicate Content
- Thin Content
- Keyword Analysis, Keyword Theming
- On Page SEO (Content Structure, Headings, variations, LSI and much more)
- Image Optimization
Before optimizing we agreed what keywords we would explore and why. During the conversation we found that some of the main keywords would be extremely hard to rank for, so I suggested we tackle some low hanging keywords with low competition but high search volume.
With the Keyword analysis done, I went about creating the structure to all relevant pages. I would provide this to the client who would then generate the content, add to the site and additionally create the internal linking silo structure suggested. Between the client and I we tackled 8 pages / month due to budget constraints.
This strategy was pushed out to all countries and is still ongoing today.
So, what were the ranking results?
The results below are for just the USA (which is an incredibly tough market within their niche)
October 2019 = 12 Keywords on Page 1 of Google
January 2021 = 96 Keywords on Page 1 of Google
Number of Clicks = An increase of 315%
Number of Impressions = An increase of 161%
The Average CTR (CTR is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click) had reduced slightly. This is down to several factors, currently they run two websites for each country, one being ecommerce and the other for standard custom build products. (This introduces the problem of Duplicate Content…..this is another subject for another day but duplicate content doesn’t help!)
Through analysis, whilst the ages we optimized are ranking well, it has helped other pages to rank which in turn are performing well but visitors are not engaging due to poor Meta Titles, Poor URL descriptions or poor Meta descriptions, none being engaging and not giving a reason for a visitor to click.
Further Search Engine Optimization Strategy and Conclusion
- For the future I will be continuing with the on-page strategy.
- The client is aware of the CTR issue and what we need to do collectively to rectify the this.
- Merge two sites into one. This is a bold move and a mammoth task, but the long-term gains will be immense. Wrapping up ecommerce website into their main sites will improve User Experience, customer engagement and loose the duplicate content!
- Off Page SEO, creating Backlinks, engaging with experts within the industry, guest posting, recreate Social Profiles.
Whilst working with a limited budget a lot can still be achieved, the customer is extremely happy with the progress and it has opened their eyes to the true possibility of utilising a long-term SEO strategy. They have seen an increase in clicks, impressions, enquiries and ultimately an increase in Sales during a worldwide pandemic.