Patching Up the Leaks in an Existing Organic Search Campaign

WARMING UP A COOL MARKET:

Unlike most competitors in the HVAC space—many of whom had only recently launched digital marketing campaigns in the past several years—Tim Stivers Heating & Air Conditioning had benefited from digital channels for the better part of a decade, working alongside a digital marketing agency to build an active online presence.

However, new leads were becoming increasingly few and far between, and it was clear that the strategies being used to great effect by the company’s previous digital marketing agency were no longer yielding the same results. In dynamic fields like digital marketing, best practices are constantly evolving, and with this in mind, the team at Tim Stivers Heating & Air Conditioning knew that they needed a future-focused marketing partner to shake things up—and found exactly that in Kobe Digital.

Local, home-based service businesses are seeing unprecedented levels of online competition. Kobe Digital’s expertise in the space allowed our team to leverage creative, cost-effective approaches to bring the Tim Stivers campaign up to date.

A FRESH TAKE ON SEO:

Search engine optimization techniques are in constant flux, with matters complicated even further by the lack of transparency provided by search engines with regard to their proprietary ranking algorithms.

Naturally, this lack of transparency leads to a great deal of speculation among those in the business of SEO, most of it well-intentioned; nonetheless, it can become difficult to separate fact from fiction, especially when algorithms are being updated constantly to reflect the evolving ways that users interact with search engines.

With change being the only constant when it comes to SEO, It’s easy for digital marketing agencies to get left behind in the shuffle. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to see many agencies using SEO techniques that not only stopped being effective several years ago, but can actively harm a website’s search engine performance by today’s standards.

In their initial audit of the Tim Stivers website, our SEO experts found several red flags, suggesting that the previous digital marketing agency had been leveraging several outdated techniques that were detrimental to the site’s search engine compatibility; these would need to be addressed one by one before our standard SEO workflow could begin.

MAKING REPAIRS:

One of the largest issues plaguing the website was a massive portfolio of toxic backlinks. Presumably, these were built as part of a previous SEO campaign; in recent years, however, search engine algorithms have been updated to prioritize backlink quality over backlink quantity.

The approach of generating as many backlinks to a website as possible—at the expense of these links’ quality—is an outdated, “black hat” SEO tactic that frequently results in penalties to a website’s search engine rankings.

Our SEO experts worked meticulously to identify which backlinks were causing the Tim Stivers site to be flagged by search engines, disavowing these links and replacing them with organically-sourced links from reputable blogs containing high-quality content.

Meanwhile, our web design team refreshed the company’s website, creating a new version that was designed for better compatibility with mobile devices—something that search engine algorithms have been updated to prioritize in recent years.

Lastly, our web development team worked to remove bot traffic and malware that plagued the site while installing state of the art spam prevention tools as a proactive measure.

SUPPLEMENTING WITH PAID SEARCH:

While it’s certainly possible to experience rapid results in certain areas of a search engine optimization campaign—typically with low-hanging fruit in the form of low-competition long-tail keywords—for the most part, the expectation is that it will be a long process, with timelines measured in months and quarters rather than in days and weeks.

However, for many small business owners—even those who recognize the immense benefits afforded by a strong organic search presence—they simply cannot stomach the ongoing marketing expense needed to support a long-term project without realizing at least some immediate upside to offset the cash outlay.

Given the extensive scope of work required on the SEO campaign for Tim Stivers Heating & Air Conditioning—disavowal of toxic backlinks and removal of spam content was required before our team could begin their typical SEO workflow, extending the project timeline considerably—a paid search strategy was implemented to provide a way to stem the tide until organic rankings could be improved.

By launching a paid search campaign in parallel with the dedicated SEO efforts, the redesigned website received a traffic boost, generating leads for the business from day one. The revenue sourced from paid search leads allowed the campaign to achieve profitability in only its second month despite the prolonged SEO timeline.