SEM Case Study

Client: Construction and mobile office trailer manufacturer

Industry: Construction trailers, mobile offices, office trailers

Sector: B2B

Introduction

Prior to working with GDMI, the client worked with another provider. He felt like a small fish in a big pond and was not given the attention or the customer service he felt he needed to be successful. Besides working with the previous provider for Internet and print yellow pages, the client had contracted with another company to optimize the site. Again, the customer service and attention given to his projects was lacking.

GDMI became the client’s provider, taking over their existing Internet and print programs. In addition, we recommended a paid search campaign on Google and off-page SEO to compliment the on-page SEO efforts they had initiated with their current SEM firm.

GDMI was able to provide a team of experts to the client. The client immediately expressed the feeling that he was in better hands than he previously had been and was anxious to implement our recommendations to his separate programs.

In the 4th Quarter of 2005, the client hired GDMI to manage current print and IYP campaigns to completion. We launched our new IYP plan, pay per click, off-page SEO and mylocalprofile.com in the 1st Quarter of 2006 with a 12-month campaign.

The goal of all these campaigns was to generate low cost leads from companies looking to buy construction trailers across the United States.

The GDMI campaign

Pay Per Click – The client had not previously used PPC as a lead generator and was excited about giving it a try. We saw initial success in driving online conversions, which led to the expansion of our PPC efforts.
Internet Yellowpages – The client was running a Superpages.com sponsorship campaign only when we were hired. We tested a paid search campaign as well on this platform and test campaigns in Chicago and Dallas for Yellowpages.com. Both were successful and expanded. We now have a nationwide campaign on both Superpages.com and Yellowpages.com covering the client’s service area.
My Local Profile – With several properties East of the Mississippi River, a local presence was very important for the client. We submitted each of their locations into our proprietary directory to get their information picked up across the local directories and search results.
Link building / Directory Submissions – The client had hired a firm for on-page optimization, but had not implemented any link building at this point. We started off with an introductory directory package to build popularity to the site.

A paid search campaign was launched in February 2006 on the Google platform. Due to the success of this campaign in January 2007 we launched test campaigns on the Yahoo and MSN platforms as well. The following were our strategic goals:

Generate online brand awareness and lead generation.
Drive traffic to the client’s website to increase online request forms.

In December of 2007, the client agreed to allow GDMI to rebuild their website in order to overcome various website issues highlighted by the analytics.

SEO Review

GDMI’s marketing efforts on behalf of the client have been exceedingly successful in 2007. The 2 main objectives we outlined at the start of year that we wanted to achieve were increased rankings on the highest converting national keywords, and to obtain location specific keyword phrases.

Current Status:
The client’s website currently has over 1,738 top ten listings across the 4 major search engines and thousands of top thirty listings. 642-keyword phrases account for these 1738 listings. Over the past month over 300 search engine listings have moved into the top 10 positions that previously had not been in the top 10 search results. The natural search traffic has increased from around 1,000 visitors per month and 25 leads to over 4,000 visitors per month and over 90 leads per month not including phone calls.

These rankings do not include the hundreds of local listings that we have obtained on behalf of the client. The screenshot below is an example of the client’s local listings in Google’s local search results. All the keywords that we are counting as in this analysis have been obtained from our analytics software, meaning that they have all driven at least some visitors to the client website and are not just vanity listings.

It is important to note that while the core keywords of a campaign in this instant ‘mobile trailers’ will likely be the most sought after and have the highest volume of traffic achieving hundreds to thousands of long tails (3-5 keyword phrase combinations) is just as valuable if not more. This is due to the fact that web users that use more qualifiers in their search phrases are likely to be further down the buying cycle moreover more likely to make contact or a purchase. We consider this achievement for the client just as valuable as achievement of top 5 listings for all their core keywords.

Top Achievements:
The largest impact to the client’s search marketing campaign this year has been the achievement of top 5 rankings, especially in Google, for the most coveted industry keyword phrases.

The other major achievement this year has been the creation and success of the location specific pages within the client website. This technique has worked extremely well, achieving hundreds of top location specific listings that have been producing substantial traffic and leads.

The campaign was expanded beyond Google to include Yahoo and MSN
The client also requested that GDMI build a new website

Moreover, the volume of business generated through the natural and paid search campaigns were such that the PPC and SEO campaigns have now become central to the overall success of the business. The budget has been increased since the launch of the campaign and the scope significantly broadened.

Client Feedback

WOW! An agency that actually listens to the client and gets things right on the first try. You are spoiling me. Great job!”

Tactics for the Upcoming Year

We achieved all the goals we set for the client campaign. Now that the client has a large steady stream of qualified visitors and leads reaching the website.

GDMI will continue its link building efforts, but we will scale down the link-building budget now that we have achieved a large lead over the majority of its competitors. There is several high-level keywords left where the client is in the top 5 results we will take action to move them into the top 2 listings for those respective keywords. Additionally GDMI will focus on adding more depth of content to the location pages that we have created improving the value of the pages. Combined with link building to the location pages we should be able to be able to achieve a dominant position in the regional search engine listing as has been achieved on the nationwide level.

Over the 1st month of the client campaign this year we will deeply analyze every aspect of the client website and how visitors are using the site and leaving the site. Analysis of this data will allow GDMI help the client reconfigured the structure of their website in order to improve visitor experience, ease of use, site flow, length of time on the website, and converting the visitors into leads.

GDMI will be redesigning the client website with all of the listed factors in mind. Additionally GDMI will design a site that W3C compliant utilizing XML and CSS making the site easy to change and expand. Making this change will give GDMI the ability to monitor, analyze, and change the client website in real time to constantly improve the conversion rate of the site and the client’s return-on-investment.

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