Inbound Lead Generation Through SEO

Our OEM Manufacturing Client came to us wanting to increase the number of Leads received from organic traffic (Google and Bing Search Engines). They had a blog set up already and an internal resource taking care of writing and updating their posts, communications and news, both on the website and on the connected social media accounts.

The company is an established manufacturer of packaging machines, therefore a New Direct Customer acquired from the internet represents a healthy profit to them. They have had an agency helping them with SEO for a few years, however, they couldn’t get as many leads as they wanted.

Our Customers’ Sales Team is well trained. The Closing Rate from Lead to Sales is fairly high. This fact gave us confidence that the inbound leads we deliver from Google Organic Search will be driven through the Sales Process quickly and efficiently. Typically, such companies are a perfect fit for our agency. So we onboarded this Client knowing that the ROI will be very high.

Let’s Start From the Results

Below you can find a screenshot of the Google Analytics reporting the Results reached in less than 6 months through the SEO strategy explained in this post. You see the number of Leads that filled in their contact details on our Client’s website willing to inquire.

6 Months Results/Facts:

Source: Google Analytics

Unfortunately, we cannot disclose the monetary impact details on the company Growth. But it’s in xx% annual revenue and profitability increase. It represents a massive ROI for our Client.

So how did we do it?

Former SEO Issues Needed Fixing

1.     Technical Issues

The web development related SEO elements are major digital marketing foundation stability influencers. We analyzed the situation thoroughly and found that the blog had many issues that needed to be addressed immediately. In fact, the blog was on a different domain than the main website, making it impossible to be impactful on the main domain organic traffic and rankings. Therefore, the authority of the website wasn’t properly leveraged and was split between two websites.

Moreover, the blog wasn’t properly optimized, the On-Page SEO setup was missing as the in-house employees that were taking care of marketing were not knowledgeable about SEO fundamentals, and the agency hired before us was only taking care of the main website. We decided to move the blog to a subdomain based on the main domain, and we redirected hundreds the old blog URLs to the new ones.

We ran an extensive and In-Depth Technical Audit of the website. About 40 pages of the Technical Audit discoveries were delivered to our SEO Strategist by the Web Development Team.

An Additional effort was put towards website speed optimization. The web pages load speed wasn’t good enough so we advised the Client on what exactly had to be improved on the server side and website code to drastically improve the overall website speed and each important page load speed specifically.

2.     Keyword Research, Mapping and User Experience

While our developers were taking care of the migration, our SEO team proceeded with the Keyword Analysis. At this point, it was very important to determine what keywords were ranking and if those were the right ones. We soon discovered that the online visitors to our Client’s site were coming from organic search from very general keywords, mostly of informational nature, but with very low buying intent (top of the Marketing Funnel). It is quite a common situation in a framework that provides a lot of content but doesn’t have a proper structure. In these cases, usually, the search engines pick and rank the terms that don’t help to achieve the business goals of the company.

It was necessary to:

• Keep the Informational Intent Traffic to some of the web pages;
• Get rid of the Traffic for Keywords that have nothing to do with our Client’s business (and this was the biggest part of the website traffic before us)
• Drive valuable traffic for the right keywords that are relevant to our Client’s business, target the bottom of the Marketing Funnel keywords and make sure the visitors complete their intended actions on the website with ease.

Our team identified the keywords with the most “intent to buy” for the industrial machines sold by our client. Those were not ranking anywhere near the first page. Once the Semantic Core was researched and built out, our SEO experts have mapped out the Keywords across the web pages. We also included our UX/UI designer into the Process to make sure the keywords mapping is in line with the intended Customer Journey of our Client’s Ideal Buyer (Persona).

On-Site Optimization

With the right keywords in mind and a thorough competitive Analysis, our team performed a thorough optimization of the website, making 10 URLs the highest priority for the next 6 months. The optimization consisted in adding and tweaking the content of the page, optimizing the URLs, formatting the pages, optimizing the images and descriptions, titles and headings, adding the right keywords in copy and anchor texts, adding the right amount of the related LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords, interlinking web pages with other core pages to make sure that the authority (SEO Juice) was passing in the best way possible.

Offsite Optimization

Once the Technical SEO and On-Page Tasks were scheduled and assigned to the team members, we carried out Backlinks Audit and Competitive Backlinks Audit. Whatever other SEO “gurus” claim lately, we know that quality backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors for Google and Bing. So the Outreach Campaign started together with the technical optimization and was aimed at getting backlinks from authoritative websites belonging to the same sector of our client. Being linked from other websites increases the authority of the website, improves the Relevancy and Trust, drives referral traffic, and sends the right signals to the search engines, and, therefore, improves the rankings for desired keywords, if done right. The SEO team analyzed the competitors' rankings and aimed at acquiring better, more powerful, more relevant backlinks from the websites that appreciate the Great Content.

Conclusion:

The leads due to organic traffic almost DOUBLED if compared to the period prior to start doing SEO on the website. The Keywords connected to the company business, targeted by our team, climbed the SERPs and led to a much higher conversion rate. The client then hired us also to run their paid advertising campaigns.