July of last year, Great Leap Studios was hired by a landscaping company to improve their website presence. We worked with landscaping SEO before, but this was the first time we were given full creative control and a monthly budget. Let’s go over the issue:
The Problems: Mediocre Hits, but Worse Conversions.
The Solution: Significantly More Keyword Targeted Content, and More Engaging Copy
We got to work using several strategies. First, we replaced all previous content with longer, better content to improve conversions, and added a few helpful conversion tools (adding a phone number to the top of each page for mobile, adding a form to the bottom). All of this content was keyword targeted. Within two weeks, the website not only received better conversions – it also moved up in search engines, although not yet by a significant amount.
Next, we added over 50 more keyword pages, focusing on not only potential keywords, but sub-keywords within those keywords to ensure no stone was left unturned. The end result was similar to the following (assume each line is its own page:
– City 1 Landscaping
— City 1 Landscape Contractor
— City 1 Landscape Design
— City 1 Pavers
– City 2 Landscaping
— City 2 Landscape Contractor, etc.
We also expanded on the individual services. Rather than place all services on one page, we parceled each one out to the types of services that someone may be looking for, from the installation of fire pits to a front yard landscape overhaul. This allowed us to make sure that not only were we in Google for some of the more unique (although infrequent) search terms. It also ensured that someone looking for a specific service would see that service, and thus trust that the company could do it for them.
There was near instant evidence that this landscape company SEO was working almost immediately – and honestly, faster than even we expected. Sometimes SEO and content can be slow, but it took less than 1.5 months to see a 200% increase in online leads.
But then we were introduced to another interesting problem. We wanted to be able to test that all of these pages were working, but knew that soon it would be difficult to judge because “landscaping season” generally only lasted until October, after which most homeowners tend to forget about their landscape and searches decrease dramatically. So we needed to boost hits as quickly as possible.
We decided to switch from new site pages to a full on content blitz – two blog posts per day, every day. From experience, we’ve seen that websites that post significant amounts of content in a short period of time (provided that content is well written and not spam) tend to get a strong temporary increase in hits and a boost in search engine rank. Content blitzes provide good long term results too, but the initial burst can be incredible. So we started posting twice per day, 5 days a week.
We found that, as we’d hoped, conversions continued to rise. By the time January/February came, the company was receiving a 600% increase in online leads. We were also able to verify that this increase was due to the content because it actually came with a decrease of 5% in offline leads and Yelp leads, proving that it was not caused by a change in other marketing strategies or word of mouth.
These strategies can be replicated by any industry. They may take a bit of a strong investment, but the payoff can be incredible and the results will always have benefits in the long term. If you’re interested in learning more, contact Great Leap Studios today.
