Why SEO is Important for Business [Case Study]

No matter the size of your business, let’s face it – everyone’s purchasing products and services online.

Your audience is there, looking for the right products in search engines. Because that’s what search engines are for.

What does it mean for you?

If you’re not on the first page, someone else is getting a lot of sales.

Because ultimately SEO is not about getting to the first page of search results.

It’s about vital business metrics—getting more visitors, leads, and sales.

In this case, I’ll show you exactly the strategy that allowed me to grow my other project’s revenue by 30%.

But first, let’s start with another question.

What’s the SEO goal for your business?

To get from point A to point B, you have to know where you want to get.

To get there, you have to focus your attention on a particular metric.

So what’s the goal of your SEO and how do you measure it?

To make it less complicated for you, there can be 3 ‘master’ goals.

1. Getting more awareness (traffic)
2. Getting more leads (conversions)
3. Getting more sales (revenue)

Simply put, something from above has to be the center of attention to you when it comes to SEO. And the key metric is either traffic, conversions, or revenue.

A well-established website can focus on all three things, while for new small business websites, the goal is pretty much starting to rank and get the first 100 organic visitors.

If you have never done any conscious search engine optimization, your first task is to let Google know that your website exists and get the first organic visitors.

Case Study

I wanted to work a little SEO magic on my other blog.

The website we’re going to discuss further is a well-established market player with one of the most visited websites in the designer bags industry.

Here are the website metrics:

• DA 52
• Traffic: 180.000 monthly
• Already ranks on first pages for niche keywords

A SEO Strategy In Action

Here’s what we did for this blog.

1. Redefined keyword strategy (more on this later)
2. On-page optimization
3. Backlink strategy for new keywords

Next, I’ll tell you more about each of the steps.

Redefine Keyword strategy

As I said, the website’s rankings were already very good. They have been pursuing keywords that describe the services that they do, such as ‘gucci authentication‘ or ‘ysl check‘

However, however astonishing that might sound, they never had an SEO strategy before. They have been creating some amazing content with much effort invested in graphics and content marketing.

First of all, we selected the keywords we were going to target. With a bit of surprise, we discovered that the customer never targeted keywords that described what their company does.

If a person is typing ‘affordable small business SEO services’ into the search box, they’re most probably interested in finding an SEO consultant who caters to small businesses’ needs.

Similarly, if someone types ‘handbag authentication service‘, they are ready to buy the service for their handbag. Right now.

It’s called a transaction search. And it’s pretty important to focus on if you want to make money.

For a lot of companies transactional searches would be too hard to pursue as in many niches too many people are going for the same keywords.

For this company, keyword difficulty was less than 50.

The primary reason for that was that these keywords didn’t offer a lot of search volume. It was mostly between 80 to 300 searches per month.

It didn’t seem like the most lucrative opportunity in terms of traffic.

However, people who type ‘luxury handbag authentication’ are 100% ready to purchase the service and are looking for a company that appeals to them the most. The probability of purchase is extremely high and the cost of a mistake is extremely low. So why not pursue these hot leads?

In addition, that would help to position the company as an authority in the niche (which they’ve never consciously done before).

Another important thing was that all of these keywords were already on the first page of Google, but their positions ranged from 5 to 9, which meant two things:

1. We can deliver results pretty quickly. It’s much faster to move a keyword several positions up on the first page than get it to the first page.
2. A small step would mean very tangible results for the business.

Once the keyword strategy was done, it was time to move on to implementing it.

On-page optimization: images & texts

After we discovered these important keywords that were never targeted, we had another eye-opening experience.

The main page was never optimized for any keywords.

For instance, image names were not optimized.

There were no ALT texts, no image name optimization, and this gigantic file caused the front page to be slow.

So here it was, our first opportunity for optimization.

As we’ve identified 5 variations of transactional keywords, we’ve implemented them on the front page, making sure every single element was optimized and brought value.

We’ve also created a separate text section that targeted some of these keywords.

Off-Page SEO: backlinks

You should post creative, engaging high-quality content and other websites will link back to you.

That’s how it should be, right?

Getting backlinks from other websites should be easy.

However, when it comes to practice, it requires a great deal of knowledge and man-hours to successfully implement a backlink strategy.

This blog already had over 8,000 backlinks.

For my blog, we aimed at niche-related backlinks only, from websites with high DA and high traffic.

I already mentioned the importance of both in the previous article on backlinks.

If the metrics are high, you don’t need much of them to make a difference.

We went with 10 backlinks from websites with Domain Authority higher than on our own website.

That means that we had to score backlinks from websites with Domain Authority over 52.

Most agencies won’t even have these opportunities, even though their SEO packages cost several thousands.

However, in just 10 days, we managed to get 10 backlinks.

I was excited to see the difference.

Results: Why SEO is Important for Business

So, did we do well with our search engine optimization strategy?

All the keywords move up in just a week.

I’m not kidding.

Some other important keywords moved from position #2 to #1 rank, which results in a dramatic difference in traffic.

Bagaholic’s sales jumped +20%.

We continue to monitor results and will update this article after 3-6 weeks to see if the results will persist.

However, my affordable SEO services have already paid for themselves.

That’s my answer to the question as to why SEO is important for business.

Simply put, it can double or triple your revenue. Not in a week though, but in a short timeframe.