case study
Increasing Year-Over-Year Organic Traffic for Our Website by Over 130%
Unlike others in our field, we decided to invest in SEO as a key marketing channel for increasing the online exposure of our digital marketing resources.
Llama Lead Gen has been busy in the last couple of years, looking for ways to expand our digital presence and bring value to our online audience. We drew on our team’s deep digital marketing expertise to create and publish extensive B2B marketing resources on our website as part of this effort.
Today, we'd like to share a rare ‘peek under the hood’ moment with you to review some of the best B2B SEO strategies that helped us increase our organic traffic year-over-year by more than 130%.
#searchengineoptimization
#organic
#seo
Results
130%
increase YoY in organic traffic
4.22%
decrease in bounce rate
7.26%
increase in average session duration
Keyword growth
Organic keywords: 1406
Page 1 keyword growth
* The spike in organic keywords in February 2021 coincides with a Google core algorithm update. It is not uncommon for keywords and rankings to be volatile during core updates. A few weeks after the update, the keyword volume normalized and continued with steady quarterly growth.
How We Did It
Our starting point was the blog content that we had already created. In 2020, we created several pieces of content for our blog around a variety of digital marketing topics, such as Linkedin marketing and advertising, budgeting, and A/B testing for digital marketing campaigns. Nevertheless, this content didn’t move the needle in organic visibility as much as we initially hoped.
After carefully reviewing our content and website strategy, we decided to break away from our “business blog” SEO strategy and instead focus on creating content clusters around our core competencies.
Content strategy pillars
This fundamentally altered our content-creation process. Instead of tackling each marketing guide for our business blog as a standalone project, we adopted a circular approach. Each of our core competencies is represented by a marketing guide, a services page, a case study, and an external piece of content (news feature, etc.). Moreover, each part of the content hub focuses on a different level of the marketing funnel.
Case Studies
Although our goal was to document our success stories initially, we decided to use this content to showcase our expertise across various industry verticals. This strategy proved to be an excellent tactic for SEO lead generation, and our marketing case studies became the foundation for each of our content clusters. In the last two years, we’ve published over 15 in-depth marketing case studies covering verticals such as Healthcare Marketing, Political Advertising, B2B SaaS, Digital Transformation, and more.
The number of website clicks and search impressions attributed to our case studies in a 16-month window.
Megatutorials
After overhauling our content marketing strategy, one of the critical activities that we undertook was to consolidate our blog content into long-form marketing guides, a.k.a. Ultimate Guides. Such pieces of content demonstrate several unique traits and advantages:
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Many marketing studies correlate content length to high Google rankings
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Long-form pieces of content are an excellent way to target long-tail keywords
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There’s enough ground to optimize content for Google’s passage indexing by providing nuanced answers to niche queries
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Long-form content provides more opportunities for interlinking
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Ranking on page one for multiple long-tail keywords is an excellent way to build natural links and improve rankings for high traffic keywords
Service Pages
Although the digital marketing space is hyper-competitive SEO-wise, our primary goal was to present the marketing services that we offer professionally and comprehensively. As a result, our initial focus was to expand our services pages across marketing verticals.
Once we hit that goal, we decided to expand our services pages towards industry verticals in which we have extensive experience. Additionally, our keyword research uncovered some excellent opportunities for SEO growth by niching down to the different industries that we service, such as with our Pharmaceutical Marketing Services.
Off-Site Content
While working on repurposing our content and compiling our long-form marketing guides, we found that some content inevitably wouldn’t fit our new strategy. As a result, we decided to use some of this material as off-site content to increase our digital footprint. In other words, we drew heavily on content that didn't fit our strategy and published in-depth pieces on digital marketing topics on other established websites.
This supplemented our other digital PR, and business development efforts and resulted in an Ahrefs Domain Rating score increase from 2 to 21, in less than two years. Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile in terms of its size and quality. Although we don’t believe that a single metric can reflect a website’s SEO, it’s still an indicator of our dynamic growth in a short period of time.
Conclusion
This case study is a summary of the SEO tactics and strategies that we used to jump-start our own SEO efforts and start generating traffic from Google to our website. Although we benefited from these strategies, it’s important to remember that SEO is a very technical field, and every business is different. There are many potential tactics that can be used to help your business rank better on search engines, but it's important to keep in mind that every tactic should be tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of your company.
If you’d like to know more about how SEO can help your business grow, and what kind of strategies we recommend, contact us today for a free consultation.
