This SEO case study describes a small business owner’s search engine optimization (SEO) journey with Nancy Burgess Strategic Marketing, Inc.
SEO is a series of web best practices that enable websites to be crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines. It helps companies to get found on the internet.
In mid-November 2018, Dan Podgorny of Kids Kustom Parties in Palatine, Illinois, called Nancy Burgess Strategic Marketing. Dan was worried.
He had hired his website development company for his search engine optimization (SEO) activities, paying $600 a month on an ongoing basis. He was not pleased with the level of service that he had gotten. Nor was he happy with the results. With a recent decrease in Yelp leads, his phone was ringing less frequently. Business had slowed.
To start, we did a thorough SEO audit. This involved:
Some of the metrics we reviewed included:
These activities not only established baseline data, but also provided direction for what the client needed.
Some parts of the client’s SEO revealed best practices. The client had a good reputation on Yelp and Google Business Profile with many five-star reviews. Fortunately, it was responding to these reviews on social media. What’s more, its site was secure, an (SSL) site. In other words, its URL began with https:// rather than http://.
However, the small business had the following SEO issues:
The site had 50 clicks for just 26 keyword phrases in 3 months–3/5 from branded keyword phrases.
We also found that nearly 3/5 of the website’s 50 organic (coming naturally from Google) traffic clicks were based solely on its brand name. In other words, the person searching on the internet already needs to know the name of the company to get it to appear on a search engine return page (SERP).
Furthermore, the site was not organized from the customer’s point of view, making the buyer’s journey difficult. Dan noted that his customers often reported that they could not find what they were looking for.
The client needed results quickly. Therefore, Nancy Burgess Strategic Marketing Inc. undertook an ambitious plan. We did the following:
Within 4-6 weeks of SEO implementation, the client began to see results. The phone was ringing, and bookings were filling.
Here are some of client’s results today. For his top 5 keywords, he is ranking first in local search, and on the first page in all desktop Google searches and 4 of 5 mobile Google searches. (He is in spot 13 for 1 of the keyword phrases.)
Furthermore, the small business boasts a nearly 200% increase in organic traffic, and six times the clicks after it engaged our SEO services.
Google is showing the client’s site much more often (called impressions). Clicks are up. Traffic is up. The phone continues to ring. Additionally, customers report that they are now able to find what they are looking for on the robust small business website.
The next two tables show data results before and after the implementation of the SEO plan.
Before SEO Plan | After SEO Plan | |
Keyword Phrases With Traffic (for 3 months) | 26 | 153 |
Organic Clicks (for 3 months) | 50 | 301 |
All Website Visitors (per day by month 4) | 34 | 56 |
Organic Website Visitors (per day by month 4) | 7 | 20 |
Impressions*(November vs April) | 13.3k | 67.9k |
Before SEO Plan | After SEO Plan | |
Links (total) | 235 | 263 |
Linking Domains (Total) | 79 | 125 |
Citation Score (goal=100) | 19 | 61 |
Mobile Site Speed (out of 100) | 50 | 61 |
This business is seeing excellent results. Results vary for each client’s unique offering, how competitive their business arena is, and how long it may take to rank. At Nancy Burgess Strategic Marketing Inc., we never tell you absurd SEO lies. Instead, we strive to optimize sites as quickly as possible following these 15 Tips for SEO. In that way small and medium size business (SMB) owners can generate optimal results as soon as possible.
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