Content marketing agency grows revenue 50% by spending 2 hours a week on SEO for 1 year
About Uplift Content:
Uplift Content writes case studies, ebooks and blog posts for high growth B2B SaaS (software as a service) companies. Its content helps its customers grow brand awareness, generate leads and produce growth within accounts.
Business Challenge
As a small, service-based business in the ever-growing and highly competitive B2B software-as-a-service industry, Uplift Content struggled to grow brand awareness and gain traction with its target audience. Brand awareness basically didn’t exist. Months would go by without a single organic lead coming through the site. The growth of the business had completely stalled.
Uplift Content had the skills to create effective marketing content for the business, but with no SEO strategy in place, the content wasn’t found. The team would write blog posts about topics they felt comfortable with, but there was little to no thought about how to best choose a topic to gain more traffic. At the time, Uplift didn’t conduct keyword research because the free tools didn’t do the job well enough.
To top it off, the Uplift team had no goal tracking in place so it had no way of tracking conversions.
“I knew that to grow and scale our business effectively, we needed to harness the power of SEO to do some of the heaving lifting when it comes to driving new leads,” says Emily Amos, Founder of Uplift Content.
Read on to learn how Uplift Content increased conversions by 1,118% by spending just 2 hours a week on SEO for 1 year.
Solution
Emily hired Stephanie Lummis UX in January 2020 to work with Uplift Content for a year to create a much-needed SEO strategy and build the company’s skills in SEO. A big fan of Semrush, Stephanie immediately incorporated the tool into all of their work together, setting up a project and connecting Google Analytics for added insights.
Initial setup
Here are the initial steps Stephanie and Emily took:
- Created a measurement framework to clarify which goals mattered most. They chose lead magnet downloads, contact form submissions, and newsletter sign-ups;
- Set up goal tracking in Google Analytics;
- Created a content inventory spreadsheet to capture keywords, title tags and meta descriptions for each page on the site;
- Set up a custom Data Studio report to pull key metrics from Google Analytics for easier analysis.
Monthly Maintenance
Keyword Magic Tool
Uplift Content uses the Data Studio reports to look for opportunities to increase organic traffic by identifying underperforming keywords for blog posts and web pages.
The company uses the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool to research and identify keyword phrases that would attract to its site a qualified audience in the research-gathering stage of their journey. The team uses those keyword phrases when creating new content or optimizing existing content.
They also created an internal linking strategy to ensure that each blog post had a call to action, pushing to a relevant service page and a related blog post if appropriate.
Position Tracking
Uplift Content uses the Semrush Position Tracking tool to monitor all of the focus and secondary keywords that its site is optimized for. It enables the team to see how the company’s visibility is improving month over month. It also allows the team to target specific keywords depending on their position.
For example, the Rankings Distribution reports are used to identify keywords that are currently sitting on page 2 of the search results. The team optimizes the page content to try to push its position up to page 1 for increased visibility.
Competitive Research: Keyword Gap Tool
Uplift Content uses the Keyword Gap tool to identify keyword phrases that the company currently isn’t optimized for, or keyword phrases that aren’t performing well compared to its competitors. The team finds it great for gathering tons of topic ideas for future blog posts. This also helps them fill in gaps where Uplift Content should be showing up side by side or above competitors.
Site Audit and Backlink Audit
The content marketing studio uses the Semrush Site Audit and Backlink Audit tools to identify technical and SEO shortcomings on its site. By fixing things like broken links and disavowing toxic and potentially toxic backlinks, it allows the company to keep the site in overall good health and avoid SEO penalties.
Results
Uplift Content spent 2 hours a week for 1 year optimizing its site (Jan 1, 2020 to Dec 31, 2020). And thanks, in part, to Semrush, the team has some impressive results to show for all their hard work:
Users:
- 1,118% increase in conversions
- 162% increase in page views
- 209% increase in sessions from organic
- 179% increase in non-branded keyword clicks
- 50% increase in revenue over the previous year
Users:
Goal completions:
The team, as a whole, has also:
- conducted a comprehensive SEO audit on the Uplift Content site;
- created an effective SEO strategy and plan;
- conducted effective keyword research;
- reviewed the SEO performance of all of the pages on the site and optimized 75% of them based on insights from the analysis;
- tracked, measured and analyzed Uplift’s analytics on a monthly basis
To sum up
By using Semrush, Uplift Content has been able to grow brand awareness, get more traffic to the website, increase qualified leads, build its client base and grow its revenue. What more could you want?
