Fortune 100 Enterprise Technology Client

Moving to Compete in Natural SEO

Today, online marketers dedicate most of their focus and resources toward reaching customers through paid search marketing. In many cases they discount natural search completely. This trend has created an extremely competitive paid search landscape where bidding wars are common and per click pricing skyrockets. Despite this, approximately 80% of clicks occur in the organic space. This means marketers who focus entirely on paid search miss out on the lion’s share of clicks from potential customers searching for their products and services. In addition to missing 80% of the clicks for a given keyword, poor organic visibility translates to immense loss of valuable branding opportunities to influence decision makers at multiple levels of the buying cycle.

For global brands, reaching potential customers via natural search is a daunting task with unique challenges not faced by smaller more nimble competitors. The tremendous amount of content housed on an enterprise domain makes it increasingly difficult to earn natural search visibility that reflects the brand strength of a company. These forces create real challenges for enterprise marketers.

Challenge # 1 — Internal Resources

Insufficient internal resources and efficiencies to manage an external link profile. Effective strategic link building is a tedious and inefficient process to manage internally. Even for  companies with unlimited time and human resources, without the expertise and best practices of link building as a core competency, the venture is likely to drain more dollars then it creates. Identifying ideal link destinations, negotiating link back terms, reporting results, monitoring success, and optimizing campaign efforts, create a complex project with the possibility to overwhelm internal resources.

 

“600,000 additional monthly branding impressions, a 400% increase in traffic, at 15% of the paid cost per visit.”

 

Solution

Partnering with Conductor has enabled clients to outsource this vital marketing/SEO function; Conductor, in turn, has delivered consistent, measurable results with significant ROI. Soon after engaging with Conductor, the Client’s external link profile and structure improved drastically, delivering superior search rankings and making the appropriate pages visible in the search results. The Conductor solution provided an initial analysis which uncovered ideal linking destinations relevant to keywords of importance. Once the linking destinations were identified, Conductor leveraged deep relationships at each publishing partner website to activate the relevant link on the target page. In total, Conductor activated 104 links from more than 40 industry leading domains (PCWorld.com, ComputerWorld.com, InformationWeek.com, NetworkWorld.com, Forbes.com, Inc.Com, etc). Without the efficiency of scale which Conductor brings, successfully contacting each of these domains individually for link requests would have taken several months, not withstanding the exclusive nature of the properties in the Conductor publisher community.

In addition to identifying Ideal Entry Page (IEP) destinations and launching links on those pages, Conductor has provided comprehensive reporting and account management. Reports feature pre and post rankings for target, derivative and control keywords. Keyword rankings for top competitors are tracked.

All target keywords of the campaign have improved in overall ranking.

Website statistics are provided from the Client’s analytics program that tracks the number of new visitors to the site. As a result of improved rankings, the number of visitors to a site will increase. Standards have been set for continuing, expanding or canceling new keywords based on cost per visitor compared to Adwords. Lastly, ROI is detailed by comparing incremental traffic gained from working with Conductor against baseline standards defined in the Client’s Adwords account.

 

Challenge # 2 — Poor Search Visibility

Minimal to zero visibility on major search engines for core business terms

On 6/20/08 Conductor began tracking 88 keywords identified by the Client as possessing significant branding and/or traffic acquisition value. At that time, 21 of 88 keywords ranked on the first page of natural search results. 15 of the 21 keywords ranked on the first page, also ranked amongst the top 5 results overall. On Google alone, the keywords not ranked on Page 1 are searched approximately 662,106 times each month. That’s 662,106 times each month that the Client’s vital keywords were virtually invisible to consumers.

Solution

Using our exclusive publishing partner inventory, Conductor developed a custom campaign of external links from highly authoritative and relevant sites to the appropriate Ideal Entry Pages. The anchor text of these links reflected the campaign target keyword and pointed to the Client’s IEP. Through a staggered activation of hand-picked links, along with very close monitoring of ranking movement, Conductor has vastly improved the Client’s ranking for campaign keywords. Conductor has also doubled the number of keywords ranking on page 1 of Google results – improving 110% (from 21 to 44). All target keywords of the campaign have improved in overall ranking (21/21). 22 keywords now rank within the top 5 Google search results - versus 15 at campaign launch.

Challenge # 3 - Non-Ideal Landing Pages

Inappropriate landing pages with content irrelevant to searcher intent ranking for critical keywords.

For 13 of the 88 keywords being tracked, search engines were serving up outdated pages with content irrelevant to searchers’ intent. These pages were negatively affecting the Client’s natural search conversions, with searchers not finding the information they were seeking and immediately leaving the site. Having the best page available when a searcher visits a site is vital, and for enterprise domains that feature thousands of content pages, coordinating this effort internally is an extremely arduous task.

Solution

with non-ranking pages that contained relevant and appropriate content for the keyword searched, Conductor activated links that pointed to the Ideal Entry Page. By launching a handful of links for each keyword, the Conductor solution replaced 92% of improper landing pages ranked at program launch. Now when decision makers search they are directed to pages with robust content that is the most likely to convert. Moving forward, potential customers will find comprehensive information on search engines that will fulfill their quest for information throughout the buying cycle. Searchers experiencing the improved results will spend more time on the site, view more pages, and more often progress to the next stage of the buying funnel.

Summary

Prior to working with Conductor, the Client did not rank amongst the top organic results for many core business terms. Nearly all of their core terms were being aggressively bid on in paid search. In addition, the actual pages that were ranking often contained overly technical or out of date content that did not convey the company’s marketing/product message. Not only was the Client very difficult for decision makers to find in natural search, the pages being served did not provide searchers information relevant to their query. Despite the obvious need to capture impressions and clicks from technical buyers in natural search; the resources, efficiencies and expertise needed to remedy the situation could not be found in-house. Within the campaign’s first two months, Conductor successfully replaced 92% of outdated ranking pages with target destination URLs. Rankings have also improved drastically. 100% of campaign target keywords have improved in rank with many derivatives experiencing similar movement. Of the 88 total keywords tracked, 44 now rank as one of the top ten Google results versus 21 at campaign launch. The Client also ranks in the top five for 22 priority keywords, versus only 15 at campaign launch.

Of the 88 total keywords tracked, 44 now rank as one of the top 10 Google results.

Not only has the campaign driven significant improvements in the number of new visitors, the improved rankings have also provided hundreds of thousands of new impressions to technical buyers who now see the Client on page 1 for core keywords. Most impressive, the new visitors were delivered at less expense than those same visitors are being acquired through Google Adwords.