As an Inbound Marketer, it's always a joy to see organic growth in traffic.
Not only does organic traffic bring predictability to a business, it justifies your tag as a true inbound marketer.
While a lot of ink has been spilled on SEO growth stories, this one is different. Being an inbound marketing agency in India, we cracked the US market with some out of the box SEO strategies for our dear client InsideSalesBox.
In January 2017 InsideSalesBox was able to get 7,824 organic visitors. But, if we look 15 months back, it seemed impossible.
Let's take a look at the complete organic journey.
About the Client
InsideSalesBox is an all-in-one inside sales software to help businesses build, manage and accelerate their sales pipeline. Built for inside sales teams, it counts amongst its many features - Sales Cadence, Dialer, Email Tracking and Lead Management.
Yes, they rank 3rd both on Inside Sales Software and Sales Cadence - Just Bragging :)
Challenge Accepted
In October 2015, InsideSalesBox was stepping into a very competitive market of inside sales, where InsideSales.com and a few others were already miles ahead.
With these guys already ruling the roost, organic was our best chance for growing business and increasing sales.
There was very little scope for us to actually leverage social media campaigns and AdWords, as the rivals were established products with a large brand search volume. The term "insidesales" is a branded search for InsideSales.com with a monthly search volume of 1,900.
We did give paid campaigns a shot, see how we created sales pipeline worth $270K for them.
Now, do you understand the challenge?
What did we do?
At Inbound Mantra, we take different approaches to search engine optimization for each client. The strategy depends on business goals and the market. For InsideSalesBox we prioritized -
- Keyword Strategy
- Publishing
- SSL
- Strategic Interlinking
- Schema
Keyword Strategy
Most important task was to decide on the keywords to target.The set of keywords were divided into informational and commercial. Commercial keywords are a priority given the buying intent, out of which inside sales looked like the most lucrative keyword to go after.
The key was to make sure that the traffic was of the right kind. We could have easily hit 7,500+ monthly visits with informational keywords, but it would have been useless.
We did a long tail keyword research around inside sales and found 98 relevant commercial keywords. Simultaneously, we shortlisted around 50 other commercial keywords. The total search volume we were running after was 25,000, but we were happy if we could even manage 2,500 in the first month.How did we take an estimate of the traffic? - Check out our process.
Publishing
Basis the above a publishing calendar was put together - 1 Content Piece / Day. The content could be a blog or a site page.This went on for 4 months and in February 2016 we hit a monthly traffic of 2,500. The traffic was up, the contacts were at a all time high of 36, but still the quality of leads was found wanting.It was a necessity to crack inside sales and inside sales software now. We had to publish more and add a few more weapons to our arsenal.
SSL
This was a part of our technical SEO efforts, where we also worked on the website speed and mobile responsiveness.We don't have much data to showcase for the impact of SSL, but it was significant. The rankings moved and rate of indexing also improved. Learn why SSL should be a part of your digital marketing strategy.
Strategic Interlinking
Now that we had some content, it was time to do some linking.
Backlinking was not a priority, but interlinking was. Pretty much how Wikipedia does it - One Topic, One Page.
Inside Sales Software was cracked and we started to rank on the second page for Inside Sales.
Schema
This was our final weapon. Since our URLs had started showing up on first pages, it was time to boost CTRs. We implemented product review schema and almost doubled search CTR.
Doubling the traffic to 7,000+. The contacts from organic traffic also increased 15 times to 75 as compared to November 2015.
Take a look at the increase in sessions just after schema was implemented on 15th July 2016.
This is how product schema looks.
Result
Take a look at our traffic numbers from October 2015 to January 2017.
More to Come
Voice Search
Buyers are evolving quickly and so are their habits.
It has been predicted that by 2020 almost 50% of the searches will be voice based.
Learn what should you change in your SEO strategy.
Video Content
Google prefers rich content.
A content which explains a concept vividly would outrank a normal piece of content easily. Recently we have come to a conclusion that adding explainer videos to pages can boost rankings. We have had success with a few keywords, but not all.
Do you think I could have done something more to boost traffic?
Let me know through comments.
