2022 Trailblazer Award Winner
ELEVATOR PITCH:
Up until 2020, RLS has historically outsourced SEO efforts. When we outsourced SEO, we found that the firms never understood the business holistically or the vision RLS was trying to accomplish. Furthermore, the firms didn’t provide specific KPIs or geographical targets that aligned with the business needs of RLS. RLS launched a national Warehouse Partners network model, wherein the marketing team would be responsible for the marketing efforts of all future partners in the network. Our marketing strategy went from regional-focused to national. As a result of not hitting the benchmarks and the business expansion, we decided to bring the SEO strategy in-house. Our team became certified in SEO and garnered the proper tools to track how we were performing nationwide. We reviewed our keyword strategy across our website and made proper changes to ensure it was up to Google’s standards. Moreover, starting in 2021, we began meeting with an SEO strategic consultant twice a month for mentorship. We also created specific KPIs and a weighted SEO calculator so that at any moment, our team knows if our SEO strategy is winning or losing. Our marketing team tracks specific KPIs that drive traffic to the website, such as the number of social posts per week, email campaigns per month, and content pieces such as blogs and press releases per month. We created an SEO calculator consisting of strategic benchmarks for inbound web traffic, such as bounce rate, top ten visited pages within Google Analytics, number of keyword phrases on the first page of Google, and inbound web sales leads. As a result, our YoY
- web traffic increased by 90.85%
- inbound web leads increased by 25%
- key service pages are consistently in our top ten visited pages within Google Analytics
- and our keyword phrase rankings are improving on Google
MEASURABLE RESULTS AND OBJECTIVES ACHIEVEMENT:
When restructuring our SEO strategy, we started from the beginning on keywords and content. We selected keyword phrases encompassing our services and revised our content to incorporate our new keywords. The updates included but weren’t limited to permalinks, photo alt text, photo and PDF file names, title tags, and descriptions. We studied our current web pages one by one and edited the rhetoric to be SEO friendly. During weekly meetings, we track the following KPIs: lead to deal conversion rate, a minimum of four social posts per week, two content pieces per month, and three email campaigns per month. We have found that when we don’t meet all of these benchmarks cohesively, the acquisition traffic from our social channels significantly decreases. Our content pieces generate social media content for us, which drives traffic to the website.
- One month, when we had only posted one content piece, our social acquisition traffic was down 47% compared to the previous month.
- Whereas, on a month when we met all KPIs, we saw our social acquisition traffic increase by 45% compared to the last month.
In addition to our marketing KPIs, we created an SEO calculator where each benchmark is weighted in significance to the SEO strategy that we review during monthly meetings. The categories we track are:
- inbound visitor traffic growth of 35% YoY (weighted 15%)
- decrease bounce rate to 35% (weighted 15%)
- having a minimum of three key service pages in our top ten visited pages in Google Analytics (weighted 25%)
- a minimum of 25% of our keyword phrases on page one of Google (weighted 25%)
- a minimum of 65 inbound web leads per month (weighted 20%).
We included marketing lead revenue and margin as goals in the calculator last year; however, we removed it from our calculator because it did not directly correlate with our SEO efforts as the other line items do. Our goal is to achieve a score of at least 90% per month on the calculator. Our 2021 year-end score was 91%.
BLAZING A TRAIL!:
Our team blazed a trail by regenerating how the typical SEO strategy is accomplished by a family-owned company. Instead of pivoting to find another SEO company, we decided to take on the challenge and bring all SEO efforts in-house by our marketing team, bolstered by certification classes and mentorship. Furthermore, we created a unique calculator so that we could not only understand how we are performing for keyword ranking but also overall sales and marketing efforts. Knowing our keyword ranking was just scratching the surface of our needs at RLS. We thrive on data-driven results, which is why we created an innovative calculator.
