How to increase search traffic by 400% due to content and optimization

Summary

One B2C company has been developing its business since 2000 and relied solely on loyal customers and word of mouth.

The growth of the business was due to the natural influx of customers, “without any strategy to attract potential customers and business development,” said Jessica Carstens, Marketing Manager, Cartelligent.

In order to start attracting new customers, regardless of word of mouth and repeat sales, Cartelligent has seriously reworked its content marketing and seo strategy.
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Customer

Cartelligent helps its customers buy or rent any new car without working with dealers. "On most online car buying sites, explained Karsten, the dealer simply buys customer information, but nothing is said about leasing programs, lending and auto exchange options."

“We give a living person - an automotive expert who will guide you through the whole process of buying a car. This employee will give advice and help you choose the best car for you. After that, when you decide that you want to cooperate with us, we can give you a good price, ”said Carstens.

Cartelligent buys a lot of cars and gets an advantage in the form of discounts and bonuses, which are then transferred to customers. Once the purchase process has been completed, the customer simply picks up his new car from the Cartelligent office. “You do not need to come to the dealership, and you will not run there and ask and ask:“ Can I talk to my manager? ”, Explained the advantages of Carstens service.

Situation

The main problem faced by Carstens is that many did not know about the existence of such a service as Cartelligent. “You have to invade their daily lives or during the process of buying a car and shout:“ Hey, look, we have a very cool service, check it yourself. ”

A year ago, Carstens faced a new challenge by launching the new website Cartelligent. “We spent a lot of time and effort on this. We had an old site, inherited by me when I first started working. The site contained a lot of photos of cars, but did not inform visitors about what services the site provides and why they should use them, ”said Carstens.

Campaign

In order to attract new customers, the company needed a website where visitors could see the whole process and gain confidence in the service.

“As soon as we launched our new website, we already knew that we would need to focus on search engine optimization. We have already laid this opportunity in the very structure of the new site, placing all the content in an appropriate way, ”she said.

Carstens knew that investing time in content development would be a serious step, especially when carrying out activities to optimize and increase customer confidence.

“We had a standalone blog, but this blog was no longer relevant. He did not bring the desired result, although we made a lot of effort to attract new visitors. With the new site, we immediately focused on how to attract and interest visitors with the service. ”

Carstens began publishing car purchase content more often. If earlier there was one publication per month, now the material was published 1-2 times a week. She also began to integrate keywords in both new and old publications.

Step # 1. Answer popular requests with content

Most of the posts that Cartelligent writes are based on Google search queries, for example:

• I’m finishing leasing, what should I do?
• Which machines are the safest?
• What technical specifications do you need to pay attention to?
• Top ten family cars?
• I want to exchange my car, what should I do?

“We have prepared a lot of content where we answered questions that interest potential buyers. We hoped that after seeing these articles, people would say, “Oh, great, this is useful information,” she said.

In addition to questions from the search engine, Carstens got ideas for a blog from employees who communicated with customers. "Quite often, the manager could come up and say something like," Many clients come up to me who ask about monitoring blind spots. Looks like a hot topic. From this you can make a good blog post, ”she said.



At the end of each article there was a small block in which the visitor was called to get advice, to start buying or to learn more information.

From the moment the site was created and opened, Carstens said that “she had more time to focus on developing and posting articles. We had a small media plan, where the topics that we wanted to reveal were marked. ”

Carstens herself writes articles for the blog, but she uses sources that help her to better understand the topic. For example, if she writes about the TOP 10 best cars, she gets information about the most popular brands and turns to specialists who are good at this issue.

“If I write about trade-in, I will contact the trade-in manager, who will provide me with professional information that I don’t have.”

At the same time, other employees of the company study and edit, if necessary, each publication. Also, besides the weekly publications, Carstens makes a monthly newsletter, which contains all the posts for the month.

Step number 2. Paste keywords into content

“When you look at a website, there’s usually little information on every page. There is a lot of empty space, which helps to perceive information better. Therefore, it is the blog that is the main place where you can integrate keywords and do it well in the context of the blog topic, ”she said.

Carstens began by reworking old content to refresh and optimize it for the key requests you need. “The content for the site was prepared from scratch ... The posts that were on the old site were transferred and reworked,” she said.

When content was created or transferred from the old site, Carstens looked it up for keywords related to the content theme.

“We spent a lot of time working through the structure of the site and browsing the content, looking for any opportunity to integrate keywords so that they look organic,” she continued.

Carstens gave an example with the words “online” and “leasing” - the key queries that the company worked on the most. “If you look at where visitors go from the search results, you will see that many go directly to the main page, which is very cool. I love the main page. Obviously, the best conversion is on our homepage. We also achieve good conversion rates from blog posts, ”she said.

Carstens constantly monitors what queries people type in search engines. When the new site only appeared last year, the main request was Cartelligent.

“We adore people who are looking for us by company name. However, now we have a lot of specific requests related to car brands that bring people to our site. This suggests that we are working hard to ensure that people come to us who are looking for information about buying a car, ”said Carstens.

Step number 3. Post content in social. networks

Carstens also set up social remarketing. Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus, Twitter and StumbledUpon, as well as contextual advertising Google Adwords. Thus, everyone who visited the site and was in California, saw contextual advertising for 30 days.



“We were hoping that if you see the blog, and have not yet decided whether it is worth your attention right now, we will be in your field of vision so that you will ever say:“ This is really a worthwhile question in order to delve into it, ”said she is.

Regarding the use of StumbledUpon, Carstens said, “We get less conversion from there, but this is a good way to get people who want to know more about buying a car. It gives a great surge of traffic in the first few weeks after publication. ”

Step number 3. Integrate content into email newsletter

In addition to soc. Networks, Carstens began to receive more responses to the monthly newsletter to its customers, which contains more detailed information.



"People write back," Thanks for the article. I really liked it, "or" Have you ever thought of writing something else? " It is always nice to receive feedback from clients about what we write, ”she said.

The monthly newsletter contains one detailed article, which alternates by topic (Top 10, or a review article about buying a car), as well as several smaller articles and 1-2 reviews on Yelp.



“We have almost 250 five-star reviews on Yelp, in 5 branches. So people really love and appreciate our service, ”said Carstens.

Testimonials at Yelp also help to gain trust, “we wanted to get people to talk about our company instead of our employees,” she said. Carstens sends letters asking to write a review on Yelp to those who appreciate the service in the questionnaire issued after the sale.

“We really ask, but we don’t force people to write reviews that usually don’t,” she said.

results

“I think this is an obvious combination of everything, but the content, I believe, helped a lot,” said Carstens about the success she achieved.

- Organic traffic from search engines grew by 400% since the site launch last July

- The number of leads obtained from the search increased by 80%

“Recently, the leads from the search have moved from the third place to the first, if we take the top three sources of new customers. This is a rather important milestone for us, ”said Carstens.

If we talk about incoming marketing, it is important to understand not only what people are looking for, but also to enable them to find the information themselves. “We had quite a lot of time, but this is definitely what we were looking for in order to get a return,” continued Cartens.

“Obviously, we are getting a serious increase in traffic from search, because this is something that is growing by itself, while we are increasing our content library. Of course, we feel that this gives us a result, and we will continue to invest our time and resources in it, ”Carstens concluded.