130% Increase in Lead Generation

131% increase in leads, 111% in clients in 2 years.

At RankUp SEO, We faced a difficult project with a financial services company in a very small niche. We began working with them in 2019 and when we started the project we faced several issues:

1. They were in a highly regulated industry and all content had to be approved,
2. They were in a localized market,
3. They were fighting against massive competitors, and
4. Their niche was so small, search volumes were abysmal.

How we began…

As with any SEO project, we first began with a full audit. We uncovered the following issues:

Accessibility

The website was extremely slow and only the homepage was optimized. There was no XML sitemap & various resources like Google Analytics and Google Search Console were not set up.

Indexability/Ranking

The site was ranking, however, it was not ranking for high intent keywords. Instead, it was ranking for largely informational terms. While these are nice, they didn’t drive the results the client wanted. They were looking for an increase in leads and ultimately clients. They didn’t care about traffic.

On-page Ranking Factors

This was where the largest improvements lied. Unfortunately, the website simply lacked topic-specific content & an internal ranking strategy. It also was not built for lead generation and so needed to be optimized not just from an SEO perspective, but also needed some conversion rate optimization as well.

Off-page Ranking Factors

As a local website, the backlink profile was fairly strong. However, the website was being ranked below non-local websites for local-related terms.

Competitive Analysis

2 of the 3 main competitors were not local websites and were instead based out of Ontario.

Our work was certainly cut out for us. We began implementing changes immediately but it took approximately 6 months to work through every page they had and create new content.

To start – we fixed all of the major technical issues, including:

• Setting up Google Search Console,
• Setting up Google Analytics with goal tracking,
• ensuring all meta tags, descriptions, H1s, sitemaps, etc were all present,
• Switching web hosts, and
• Optimizing the site speed.

It wasn’t any surprise that just this alone started moving the needle on the existing content. We actually saw a fairly substantial increase in traffic, but alas, no increases in leads at this point.

The greatest results we saw were creating new content and repurposing and optimizing existing content to target keywords that were high-buying intent keywords. We tackled two main issues first:

• Optimizing existing content & landing pages to CRO best practices, and
• Created new content for high-intent keywords.

This process actually led to a stabilization in site traffic. However, the results were astonishing. Once the fixes were applied, and we then switched our attention to off-page work, we began seeing some pretty incredible outcomes.

Results?

Within a 2 year timeframe, our clients saw an increase in organic traffic lead gen by 131% and an organic website client increase by 111%.

The best part? The changes we made also had a drastic improvement on the conversion rate of non-organic traffic as well.