Growing Search Visibility for a Technology Company

As difficult as building traffic to a brand-new site is, it is often harder to rebuild visibility and traffic to a site that is in decline. In highly complex and technical areas, creating high quality Expert, Authoritative, Trustworthy and Interesting content is often a challenge, with often a trade-off between ‘expert’ content written by technical people and content written for the purposes of SEO by non-technical people which is not sufficiently authoritative or trustworthy.

This case study illustrates how Zelst has ridden these challenges and rebuilt, then significantly grown the search visibility of a site which was in decline, whilst producing high quality technical content which has targeted, been consumed by and enjoyed by its focus audience, at the same time as demonstrating high E-A-T factors , which has ensured the content has been quickly seen and found by our clients target market. This has resulted in strong growth in highly targeted traffic, which has driven high quality enquiries and delivered an exceptional Return on Investment.

Nick runs a well-established bespoke software development company based in Yorkshire. They offer purpose-built technology solutions to medium-sized, large and enterprise businesses, principally in the UK, including Cloud Solutions, Digital Transformation, Web Apps, Mobile Apps and IoT Development.

Most of Nick’s business traditionally came through referral. However, he realised that in order to provide a sustainable and steady flow of work to his team of highly skilled software engineers and to enable the profitable growth of his company, he needed a more reliable and maintainable business generation model.

He recognised that for the types of business he catered for, the lifetime value of each client was significant, provided that the lead was of the right quality in the first place. Up until now, however, finding and signing these types of client had proved extremely difficult.

Nick had enjoyed success with SEO in the early days of his business and understood its scalability, pinpoint targeting potential and value, appreciating that the Return on Investment from SEO was substantially higher than other forms of advertising and marketing. As his market had become more competitive, he had lost visibility and his leads had dried up. The company had invested in SEO and PPC over the past few years but any leads generated were of poor quality and, often, were more trouble than they were worth.

Nick contacted Zelst in the back end of 2018 for a more professional and strategic approach to both SEO and PPC. He was initially concerned that the highly technical nature of his company’s work and the complexity of it would make the undertaking challenging.

Just letting you know that we got our first sale from the website for this year. Initial £40,000 value……

“I am just writing and letting you know that we got our first sale from the website for this year. Initial £40,000 value……

Thanks for all your help.”

Nick

Technology Company

Managing Director

Zelst took time to fully understand the business, its abilities, capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, competition, objectives and ambitions, spending time in the business to really understand it and get to know the key players and culture.

In the crucial first immersion meetings, Zelst were able to identify:

• The type of work that the company wanted to do
• The target audience
• The buying cycle
• All of the various people that would potentially be involved in the decision making process
• What they key decision criteria might be
• Which other companies they would be competing with in key buying decisions
• Every single stage of the process from initial research to order sign-off

Target client profiles were identified and buyer personas were created for each of the key decision influencers. Extensive keyword research was then undertaken to identify each type of search query that might be undertaken by these personas, in each stage of the buying cycle and the search intent behind those.

Zelst understood that the types of query and keyword that the company needed to be found for (rather than wanted to be found for) were generally very low volume, often not even triggering paid ads. It recognised that many of the terms targeted previously were not relevant for the business, which is why they had generated such poor-quality leads and believed that, at this time, the focus should be switched from paid search and biddable media to SEO and Content.

Having agreed the keyword targets with Nick and his team, Zelst developed a new, optimised site structure, focusing on the key target areas of business and created a detailed content plan, which prioritised developing a series of detailed technical, long form, blog posts together with improving on-page site content, in a strategic approach to SEO and Content, that Nick had not experienced before. Using a search intent based keyword strategy, Zelst targeted keywords and developed relevant content in order to capture a wide range of SERP features and ensure that the site was seen and found by the people that mattered most.

When Zelst first started working with Nick, his site had zero visibility across the keyword terms that had been identified as important. Even more challenging, was that the site had been suffering from the double whammy of poor SEO strategy and implementation in the past and a badly handled site migration, meaning that traffic was plummeting and numbers were falling every month.

Zelst warned that developing and implementing their strategy would take time and things would get worse before they got better, which Nick and his team understood and fully supported.

Zelst started work in December 2018 and, as anticipated, for the first three months, visibility remained extremely poor, with traffic continuing to fall, however by April the first signs of life materialised and visibility has been steadily rising since then, as you can see from the graph higher up the page.

Traffic, which continued the trend of falling for the first couple of months, gradually saw a decline in the rate of fall, moving to positive figures in September and growth has surged since then.

Nick is now getting quality enquiries and turning these into quality clients. Zelst is continuing to create compelling, highly technical content which remains highly targeted. The content is ranking well, driving high quality traffic and boosting search visibility across an even wider range of relevant terms, ensuring that the company is being seen and getting found by the people that matter most.

Get in touch with our team of experts or alternatively, make the most of our Free Visibility Report.