Client: Upscale Catering Company in Massachusetts
Challenges: Client was using traditional PR and Outbound Marketing techniques, pay-per-click advertising, an email newsletter, and Facebook. Their pay-per-click campaign was sending an average of 1,000 visitors per month to the site with a 1% or less lead conversion rate. Most of the “leads” were companies trying to sell them services. The site was not optimized for traffic producing keyword phrases which resulted in little traffic from search engines. They were found in Google if their company name was searched but not by those searching for their services. The business was depending on referrals from sites such as the Knot.com and Weddingwire.com to produce website leads for their salesforce.
Initial Statistics:
- Website Grade (effectiveness rating): 43 out of 100
- Traffic Rank (lower is better and means higher traffic): 5,429,732
- Blog Grade (goodness score): 8 out of 100
- Visits from Social Media - 4
- Organic Traffic (from search engines) Month 1 - 456 visits primarily for company name.
Goal: Replace the pay-per-click paid traffic with organic traffic, add search engine optimized content to increase visitors, increase social media use and generate strong leads they could convert to customers.
Impact over a 7 month period:
- Website Grade (effectiveness rating): 96 out of 100
- Traffic Rank (lower is better): 3,200.398 (2,171,211 month 10)
- Blog Grade: 51
- Visits from Social Media - 252
- 164% increase in traffic.
- Pay-per-click discontinued within 5 months (saving money)
- 154% increase in leads
- Improved lead quality and conversions- 99% of the leads now good quality.
The Strategy: There was not a budget to rebuild the website so we put together a plan to get the best results possible with what we had to work with. We cleaned up and reorganized the content, optimized pages for high-traffic key words as best we could and began creating optimized content.
When planning an event, many look for a venue before a caterer. We devised a strategy to attract visitors searching for local event venues by providing the information they wanted and the ability to compare venues without leaving the site. We focused the chef’s blog on topics that would be of interest to people planning events and those who enjoyed food. We added posts such as food interest stories, food allergy tips, and recipes. We promoted company news and their blog thru social media to draw visitors to the website and build a community.
We are still actively engaged with the client. Inbound Marketing is a closed loop. Measuring results, refining the plan, and executing the strategy brings long term results and steady improvement.