ENDORSIVE
SEO CASE STUDY
Work in Progress - Local SEO for Business Broker/M&A Advisor (Financial Market)
Hightlights
- Coming Soon
Problems We Faced
- Niche with very low search volume
- Poor awareness, hard to convert leads
- Very difficult to compete for international terms
- Most digital marketing solutions don’t work due to the audience demographic (55 years and up)
What We Provided
- Competitor research
- GMB set up
- GMB KW optimization
- Optimize KWs for sales pages
- Re-write copy for sales pages
- Linkbuilding
Client
Challenges
Competing in an oversaturated market
Due to the nature of the industry(B2b-low volume), most firms do not see much success with digital marketing means such as google ads or SEO. The industry operates through referrals that were not viable since Acme has only been around for 3 years while the other brokerages have been around for 20 years or more with a much larger customer base.
Turned down by various SEO agencies due to the difficulty of the niche, he decided to take the matter into his own hands. He used various AI SEO tools that gave him some small success initially but did not help much in the long run. With the on-going google updates, the website’s ranking even plummeted further.
The client is still relying heavily on cold outreach mails and cold calling that is not a viable solution in the long run. But feels that the industry is ripe for a change.
Solutions
The issues were that the site did not have a strong backlink profile, and it was trying to compete against the terms by international sites with much higher authority.
It’s almost impossible to compete against those international sites, but we can compete for location terms such as the county seats. Those are low in competition as it’s easy to rank on the top 3 positions for those terms. And if we have multiple such sites, we can easily dominate the local search terms and pull in a decent amount of traffic.
Aside from building links to the site, we also implemented Google My Business for the business. This would help establish the site’s authority and help with the rankings.
“At first we were skeptical about the team's ability to deliver ... however, we were impressed by how transparent and accountable they were. They came down to our office to explain and firm up the traffic plan for the site, set realistic goals, and deliverables. We felt that they were sincere and transparent so we decided to engage them."
We optimized the keywords for those content and the traffic started trending up over the next 10 days. However, the owner of feedback that there wasn’t an improvement in the number of leads coming in. This was a strong indicator that there might be a conversion issue with the site.
The next step was to map out the user experience when navigating the site and find holes in the sales funnel. Some of the issues addressed were:
- The menu wasn’t intuitive. The users were directed to broken pages or loans that weren’t offered which resulted in a high bounce rate. A new service directory was created and loans not offered were removed.
- There were many redundant pages and duplicates. I.e to multiple “about” pages. It was removed as it was causing keyword cannibalization.
- Created new sales pages for loans offered with optimized keywords.
- The copywriting for the sales pages were generic and didn’t quite evoke emotional responses or direct the user to take a specific action. We rewrote the sales copy with more emphasis on empathy.
As the site was built 5 years ago, there were parts of the site that started breaking due to the code, hence a high bounce rate is inevitable. We did our best to plug the holes in the sales funnel.
Results
Tripled the amount of average daily leads within 30 days.
Started SEO work on the 5 Sep. Traffic continued to trend up after keyword optimization. (High Volume on SEP 16 due to to support work)
“Our call applications track very closely to the amount of email inquiry leads. The increase in the amount of traffic also doubled our phone enquiries."
Before (Month of Dec 2020)
Total monthly leads of 62 and an average of 2 leads per day. The highest no. of leads per day is 5 while the lowest is 0.
After (Month of Sep 2020)
Total monthly leads of 119 and an average of 6.18 leads per day. The highest no. of leads per day is 8 while the lowest is 0.